100 Books to Read Poster - Number 1

Here is the picture revealed when I finished the book and scraped off the silver covering

Sadly it's not very clear, due to the way the light falls and the reflection of the flash. I can see this being an ongoing problem, but anyway the picture is of a raven and the book, as previously mentioned, was American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

I'd never read anything by Neil Gaiman before and I have to say that based on the experience of reading this I'm not in a rush to read anything more. 

I gather this was a huge seller and very well received when first published; so well received that there was a 10th Anniversary edition brought out, into which Gaiman inserted quite  a lot of material that his editors had persuaded him to cut first time around. I suspect that his editors had the right of it.  The version I listened to was this anniversary edition, complete and unabridged, with multiple voices and a very self regarding preface written and read by the author in which he told me rather more about the process of writing and revising the book than I wanted to know, and much of which would have been better placed at the end rather than the beginning. 

The multiple voices were a good idea; the selection less so, in that Gaiman read a lot of it himself, the  main character, Shadow was voiced by someone else, and both he and NG have extremely soporific voices. Several times wile listening to them I fell asleep. 

The basic idea of the book is a good one; a war between the Old Gods in America who were brought by all the people who have ended up living there over time, and the new ones who are a product of contemporary American society. The problem isn't with the premise, but with the  execution. To begin with there is far far too much superfluous detail in the book, and a neat twist towards the end is somewhat spoiled by a weak and indeterminate epilogue.

Since the action is seen via Shadow, and he is inextricably linked with Mr Wednesday (the Norse God, Wotan) then the reader is more intimately acquainted with the old gods or at least those who Gaiman puts in the book. treatment of the new gods is perfunctory. There don't seem to be very many of them, there's technology in various forms, and conformity, but if there was any sign of money or sex  or even religion I didn't spot them. So however much the  reader is told that the old gods are doomed by the new ones, it's very difficult to understand why. (Obviously this is partly to do with the fact that on one side you have all the possible gods from hundreds of thousands of years of human history, and on the other basically one or two dreamed up personifications of things that are  important to the people in one country in the late C20, which makes for something of an imbalance. And the basic conflict is not made exciting for the reader because the side for which the book designs them to have sympathy never really seems to be in jeopardy at all, despite two prominent members of it being killed off during the action. 

So to sum up, too long, too detailed, too much showing off by the author and really too big an idea to be successfully confined to a novel. Or to this one anyway. I'm glad I persevered with it to the end, because after all that's the whole point of 'reading the poster', but overall it was a huge disappointment. 

I'm not going to give star ratings to these  books, since reading is such an individual thing, but they will all get a personal Hit or  Miss.

Verdict for American Gods - A Miss.