• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

Neil Gaiman

I am currently reading his novel American Gods. Though it is not an easy read nor an easy novel, I think he has a lot of inspiration and imagination as well. he is a nice author in the overall.
 
After finishing Anansi Boys earlier, I'd have to say it was more enjoyable than American Gods. I got tired of all the side stories in AG and thankfully Gaiman kept those to a minimum this time around. Gaiman neatly wraps up the characters' fates towards the end, but if he revisits the world of Fat Charlie and Spider I won't be complaining.
 
I wonder if Dean knew that the money needed to be spent else it would have been lost.

So if you want to pay me to come in and talk, it’s expensive.

The vast majority of the events I do and of the talks, lectures or readings I give are done for free, often as charity fundraisers. (For example: the night before the Stillwater event I spent the day in Chicago, speaking to 1600 people who had paid up to $250 a ticket, as a benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. http://www.bleedingcool.com/2010/04/18/neil-gaiman-at-c2e2/ is a description of the event.)

So. I was asked if I’d come and talk at Stillwater, and be paid $40,000. I said, “That’s an awful lot of money for a little library.”

“It’s not from the library. It’s from the Legacy Fund, a Minnesota tax allocation that allows the library to pay market rates to bring authors to suburban libraries who otherwise wouldn’t be able to bring them in. They have to use the money now as it won’t roll over to next year and expires next month.”
Click to expand...
 
Fantasy Moon said:
I've started reading Gaiman's blog over the past couple of weeks. I need to read more books he's written.
Click to expand...

I've been a follower of his blog for some time now...His message boards are also an interesting read/participation if you are an avid Gaiman fan.

I re-read American Gods not too long ago and I had forgot how fond of the book I was. Well worth the revisit. The Graveyard Book, though a children's novel it may well be, I must own that it is a favourite of mine; I love the premise.
 
I've only read Neverwhere and American Gods. It took me a long time to fall off the fence about reading his work, but now I want to read all of his books. Didn't realize he had a blog, thanks! :)
 
I recently reread American Gods and I genuinely loved it, still. The depth of his mythology and his subtle mixture of (American) pop culture and the Norse pantheon are quite impressive indeed. I am very glad to hear that HBO is going to turn it into a TV show. I think that (if done well) it would be very suitable for an adaptation of that type.

That said, I have a love/hate relationship with Gaiman. AG and Neverwhere were fantastic, but Anansi Boys, Coraline (strictly speaking a children's book, I know) and his collection of shorts Fragile Things did very little for me for reasons I cannot quite put my finger on.

In that respect he's a bit like Douglas Coupland for me; when he's on form, he's great, but when he's not, he's decidedly meh (if you'll excuse the colloquialism).
 
American Gods is being turned into a HBO miniseries? This makes me happy in my pants.

Anansi Boys was good but lacked the darkness of American Gods. I did enjoy the stories about Anansi -- they have a very Native American flow to them and I am sure Gaiman mined the Native American myths for the storytelling style.
 
Let me stress that while I vastly prefer American Gods over Anansi Boys, the latter is still a pretty darn good book. A Gaiman that is (in my opinion) not on top form is still better than most of the rest.

And yes, HBO is supposedly turning AG into a series; Gaiman co-writes and the guys who gave us Band Of Brothers (Tom Hanks et al) are producing. Should be good.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top