I have never been very good at approaching my reading
systematically. I will pick up whatever the heck I want to read, whenever I
want to (or am able to). Thus, a look at my to-be-read pile will reveal a
mish-mash of genres, authors, and page counts. Some books are barely longer
than 150 pages, others are well over 1000. Dante’s
Divine Comedy is palling around with a bunch of Rex Stout’s Nero
Wolfe novels, and my Paul Halter omnibus can be found next to a Latin edition
of
Winnie the Pooh. Sometimes, I pick
up a book that is extremely long, and then it takes me a long time to finish
it. Which means that the review takes a long time to go up. Hence the delay since
my last review. With this word of explanation, I’d like to begin talking about
Neil Gaiman’s
American Gods.
But before I do, let me answer the objection: “This is a
crime fiction blog! What on earth are you doing reviewing a fantasy novel?” My answer is this: I
have no answer for you. Technically, you
could
consider this a mystery novel – there is a mystery that is solved at a certain
point in the novel – but I wouldn’t recommend approaching it as such. The
reason I picked up this book is tangentially related to crime fiction – Bryan Fuller’s
next project after t
he fantastic TV series Hannibal
was a television adaptation of
American
Gods. I was intrigued by the description, and the book landed on my
to-be-read pile. I felt like picking this book up a few weeks ago, so I did.
