So from reading Mark Reads I've temporarily decided to try and start cataloging the books I'm reading. Because I've also realized that the way I read books apparently leads me to effectively forget all but the barest themes of what I'm reading (for instance, I couldn't off the top of my head recall the past 5 most recent books that I've read). Correspondingly, rather than do something silly like that, I'm going to start with the one that inspired this. In short Mark Reads' amazingly loving chapter-by-chapter description of American Gods is thoroughly reminiscent of my sentiments about that book in retrospect. This is unfortunately significantly tempered by the fact that every time I read this book (3x - 6x as broad estimates), short of a handful oh "oh shit, that's amazing" moments, the slow pacing makes it only a moderately enjoyable experience. For more unnecessary caveats on what I think about the book, it's borderline in the top 10 of my favorite books, but is still a disappointment. Basically, the book is very well written, has a plot that keeps you guessing, and interesting occasionally dynamic characters, and yet it's still lacking. How could that be, oh, mythical reader you may ask, aren't those all good things? Yes.... but this should be my favorite book. 1: It's written by one of my top 5 writers and one of my top 3 choices for a living person to have lunch with, 2: Mythology has always been interesting to me, mostly Greek who are largely absent in this story (though I can toss out references to Izanagi, Quetzacoatl, Anansi, and Coyote fairly reasonably), 3: and I may have mentioned this before, everything about this book is awesome when I think about it and am not specifically reading it.
Ok so problems in unnecessarily nested lists:
A) totally unnecessary side-stories that contribute marginally to driving the plot forward, are totally meaningless even when they're interesting. Examples: 1: the time in Kayro, I get it, we need more explication about the gods, how they work, and to presumably build tension. I like this part of the book, but it still drives me crazy because nothing is freaking happening; 2: the time at the lake is pretty much the exact same thing, but rather than explication about the gods, it serves to remind us that there are normal people in this world and Shadow (while extremely awkward) is one of them; 3: and this is the part that drives me even more crazy is that the other reason to have the lake is to have the also entirely unnecessary ending (which isn't really an ending because this book ends 5 times, more on that later). This added nothing to the book (maybe making us believe Shadow is a god, but we could have inferred that from the part that he was chosen by Odin and, oh-yeah he's Odin's son).
B) Shadow is basically a prop, he moves when people tell him to move, he doesn't question. I get that he's not alive, and that his finally becoming alive after dying is the big climactic moment of the book where he decides to become a person.
C) MCSWEENEY NO! Seriously there are 4 or 5 moments in this book where I'm visibly emotive while reading which happens only rarely, but this book is freaking heartbreaking at times.
D) This book simultaneously convinces me that nothing this cool could ever happen, but also that everything in this book happens all the time.
Net - net, I love this book in theory. I'm probably going to re-read it fairly soon, but I'm going to be pissed off pretty much immediately thereafter.
And for shits and giggles, I'm going to try and find my favorite quote. This one unfortunately is I'm pretty sure designed to give me CTS:
"I can believe things that are true and I can believe 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 Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, 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 wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women i believe that 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 everynoe'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 the 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 bumblebee 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 that 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." - Sam
It reminds me of the Mary Schmich article made famous by Baz Luhrman's "Wear Sunscreen" video which convinced me that I need to live in LA and NYC, but said absolutely nothing about Chicago.
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