Neil Gaiman: American Gods

Highly enjoyable - but occasionally frustrating when did not recognize all the gods -although given they came from every single age and culture perhaps not surprising. Its a great concept that he has and he executed it with great flair. I would also have been interested to see more of the 'modern' gods who are the main opposition, like God of Media as i think there could be an interesting story there - they were, perhaps understandably, somewhat in the background and even in the climax, were there more as a dramatic device rather than fully realized characters.

The whole novel, is, like much of his work, somewhat rambling and picaresque in nature - but that, with this is only to be expected I suppose. My main criticism is that his prose style is pretty 'ordinary' not dully mundane but I did often feel that, given the cosmic grandeur of what was happening, that the quality of the prose - the language the imagery, did quite often not match p to the scene -there was even in places a certain flatness which did detract somewhat from the scene. I started to read Zadie Smith's On Beauty immediately after this (its wonderful so far) and just in the first few pages, the vigor, brilliance and precision of the prose really stood out remarkably compared to the much more functional prose of Gaiman (and how is his name pronounced - GAYman? GUYman? GEEman?).

The sentence structure is---fine and decent and lucid but no more. There's something of a lack of metaphor too...

But a great read and I will certainly try more - must further explore the other graphic novels I think.