My Favorite Reads: American Gods

My Favorite Reads is hosted by Alyce on her blog At Home With Books. The idea is to take a book you read before you started blogging and tell your readers about it.

This week I chose American Gods by Neil Gaiman.


I was going to do these different but realize now that I can't! I'll explain down the page.

From Neil Gaiman's website:

Released from prison, Shadow finds his world turned upside down. His wife has been killed; a mysterious stranger offers him a job. But Mr. Wednesday, who knows more about Shadow than is possible, warns that a storm is coming -- a battle for the very soul of America . . . and they are in its direct path.

From my memory:

The Gods of old are at war. These would be the Gods from all the religions of the past, the religions of now, and the mythologies we never considered "religion." These Gods are not at war with themselves. They are at war with the new Gods of America. That would be Commerce, Interstate, Internet, Television, News, Cellular and many more. Who will win? Who should win? Is it all that important anyway?

I wanted to do the MY Favorite Reads meme in a different way. I wanted to tell the summary of the book from my memory because I felt that this would highlight what I thought was important and special about the book. Unfortunately, it's been so long since I read this book and I read it at a very difficult time in my life that I couldn't tell you any more about this book than what I just wrote. I had to go to another site to even remember names!

This is the book that started me reading "urban fantasy," the type of fantasy in which people just like you and me deal with amazing and fantastical things. My two favorite writers in this type of fantasy are Neil Gaiman and Charles de Lint, though even their books are very different form each other. This is fantasy set in our own world, in modern times yet there are magical and wondrous things are happening if you just open your eyes to see them. I do remember that I loved this book so much that I felt a desperate need to read anything and everything else by Neil Gaiman. It's a wonderful book and I suggest you pick it up soon!