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balmoral

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balmoral  ·  3623 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 'bl00's Reviews #3: "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman

This is very true - I mentioned it because most of his other "cinematic" works like Coraline are aimed at children.

I just looked into other novels by him to recommend something, and struck out. Good Omens was a lot of fun, but rather different than his other work. I had no idea how little he'd actually written for adult novels!

balmoral  ·  3625 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 'bl00's Reviews #3: "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman

Bump it up if you can. It's heartbreaking, and it doesn't feel anything like Adam's books. Honestly, it feels like a conversation with the man himself - it's witty in an offhand, unstructured way. It's sad and beautiful and doesn't have the "pat" feel that gets some much of the rest written off as juvenile.

balmoral  ·  3625 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 'bl00's Reviews #3: "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman

As one of the three people you mentioned, damn do I appreciate this. I read American Gods first, and thought it was clever and atmospheric at the time. I still think it's atmospheric, but all the cleverness was merely implied. (If you want good Gaiman, go watch Neverwhere. He wrote it for BBC 2 and it's aimed at adults - I liked it far better than anything else of his I've encountered.)

CL&D was flawed, but it was flawed out of ambition and daring. American Gods was flawed out of shallowness - it merely left me thinking "something was very clever there", and when I stopped to find it I realized it was all smoke and mirrors. I wish it would share a bit of it's fame with deeper, more worthwhile books.

Of course, I'm biased. Zelazny fits me perfectly also, and I've never found anyone quite like him. Kerouac does sci-fi, maybe. If I wanted to read a great work about flawed and mortal gods I'd go back to Lord of Light.

balmoral  ·  3844 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why Gen Y Yuppies are Unhappy

Interestingly, this appears to have been edited significantly. It looks like the author removed the yuppie-identification checklist that was being torn to shreds so thoroughly without any comment on that fact.