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American Gods (American Gods, #1)

Neil Gaiman

Start date: June 1, 2012

Finish date: June 30, 2012

Discussion: Former Group Reads

Discussion leader: Jeshu

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Former Group Reads

* Reckless by Amanda Quick (September 2013 Group Read)
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last updated Oct 26, 2013 12:24PM

* Beauty and the Bounty Hunter by Lori Austin (September 2013 Group Read)
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last updated Sep 01, 2013 07:24AM

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What Members Thought

Mar 09, 2012 Anne (Booklady) Molinarolo rated it liked it

Shelves: good-fiction, spring-2012, sci-fi-fantasy

3.5 Stars

“People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe, and then they do not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjuration. People populate the darkness; with ghost, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe; and it is that rock solid belief, that makes things happen.”

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or no 3.5 Stars

“People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe, and then they do not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjuration. People populate the darkness; with ghost, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe; and it is that rock solid belief, that makes things happen.”

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”

“One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.
The tale is the map that is the territory.
You must remember this.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

And what a tale 2002 Hugo and Nebula Award winner Neil Gaiman tells! Shadow Moon is counting the days and hours to his release from prison. Concentrating on his coin tricks and “doing his own time,” Shadow is looking forward to resuming life with his wife, Laura. But he feels “a huge storm coming.” And it does come. Two days before his release date, Laura and his friend and would be employer, Robbie, are killed in an automobile accident, leaving the hapless man nothing to go home to. On the plane home to bury his wife, Shadow meets a mysterious man, Mr. Wednesday. Wednesday knows everything about Shadow and offers the ex-con a job. Having nowhere to go and nothing to look forward to, he drinks Wednesday’s Mead even though he suspects the old man is a grifter. But with promises that nothing he does will land himself back into prison, Shadow still feels the ominous storm prickling his neck. He should, because the storm coming is the great battle of the forgotten gods of America’s immigrants against her new gods of media, internet, and neon. Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.” In time, we readers and Shadow both know this. This is a bad land for gods…The old gods are ignored. The new gods are as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for the next big thing.

Gaiman brilliantly peppers the story with vignettes of the forgotten gods. I loved that he chose Cairo ( pronounced Kay-row) Illinois as place that Shadow is hidden. Misters Ibis and Jackal were wonderful. However, the tale was too long. The repetitions that a storm was coming drove me to scream disturbing my two cats. Though impressed with Shadow’s growth both in front and behind the stage, I felt cheated at the end of the “great battle.” I expected more, not what was revealed.
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Jul 24, 2015 Ramona Wray rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, mythology, adult

A beautiful book. It reaches across different continents and eras and brings together a line-up of mythological figures, some more widely known than others, as well as the personification of large modern concepts, dubs them all “gods”, and proceeds to have fun exploring even greater concepts ranging from religion to loyalty, sacrifice, love, and once again, faith. It’s almost incredibly easy to read and a well-crafted page-turner.

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Jan 03, 2015 Mallika rated it did not like it

i know I am in the minority here if the people not liking the book but its so weirdly all over the place that i can't seem to enjoy it. it reads "a man gets swallowed by a woman's vagina" .... i think it was indication enough to put it down. ...more

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