Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

56: American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

I'm free! I'm free! I'm finally free! This is a long book (about 13 hours to read), I made it to the 75% point, skimming muchly after the 50% point. But I pushed on and on, certain the problem was me. Everyone loves this book! I never heard any comments about it other than "It's my most favorite book ever!" So I knew the issue with me not enjoying it had to be me.

Finally I went to Goodreads to check the other reviews. The very first review, with 1169 likes (tenfold more likes than I've ever seen on a review) was a one star review. In the first ten reviews, there are 3 one-star ones, most around two to three stars.

Thank god it's not just me. I really thought there was something wrong with me that I didn't enjoy this.

I watched the show based on this book when it aired and LOVED it to death. I just started rewatching the show and realized I hadn't read the book, so I paused my rewatch to read.

For such an interesting subject (America has its own version of all the gods of the world, and they walk among us) the story was so dull. If I hadn't seen the TV show, I'd have zero interest in any of the characters. The writing was just so meandering and so much of it was just so pointless.

Plus Gaiman's writing just has so many issues. He uses a single dash in the place of commas or just randomly. I highlighted more than a dozen places the writing or editing annoyed me, when at most I usually highlight one or two things in a book. Some examples of the dash issues:

The children-were packed in tightly and ignored.

Shadow's meal consisted of an all-day full breakfast-it came with hush puppies-while Mr. Ibis picked and pecked at a slice of coffee cake.

No-they aren't even fruit sellers.

Plus tons of editing and grammar issues (missing punctuation, incorrect word choices, and in one case a random word just on its own after a sentence).

If you're interested in this story, check out the American Gods TV series. I wish I could recommend the book version of it, I stuck with it many many hours more than I should have (almost ten hours of reading! When I didn't enjoy it from page one!), but I just can't. The show is great though!