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American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition
American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition
American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition
Audiobook19 hours

American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition

Written by Neil Gaiman

Narrated by Full Cast

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

About this audiobook

Now a STARZ® Original Series produced by FremantleMedia North America starring Ricky Whittle, Ian McShane, Emily Browning, and Pablo Schreiber.

Locked behind bars for three years, Shadow did his time, quietly waiting for the day when he could return to Eagle Point, Indiana. A man no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, all he wanted was to be with Laura, the wife he deeply loved, and start a new life.

But just days before his release, Laura and Shadow’s best friend are killed in an accident. With his life in pieces and nothing to keep him tethered, Shadow accepts a job from a beguiling stranger he meets on the way home, an enigmatic man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. A trickster and a rogue, Wednesday seems to know more about Shadow than Shadow does himself.

Life as Wednesday’s bodyguard, driver, and errand boy is far more interesting and dangerous than Shadow ever imagined. Soon Shadow learns that the past never dies . . . and that beneath the placid surface of everyday life a storm is brewing—an epic war for the very soul of America—and that he is standing squarely in its path.

“Mystery, satire, sex, horror, poetic prose—American Gods uses all these to keep the reader turning the pages.”—Washington Post

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperAudio
Release dateJun 21, 2011
ISBN9780062101914
Author

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is the New York Times bestselling and multi-award winning author and creator of many beloved books, graphic novels, short stories, film, television and theatre for all ages. He is the recipient of the Newbery and Carnegie Medals, and many Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Will Eisner Awards. Neil has adapted many of his works to television series, including Good Omens (co-written with Terry Pratchett) and The Sandman. He is a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR and Professor in the Arts at Bard College. For a lot more about his work, please visit: https://www.neilgaiman.com/

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Reviews for American Gods

Rating: 4.096674346906419 out of 5 stars
4/5

12,930 ratings597 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Great book. Lots of twists and turns I wasn’t expecting and very captivating.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Nothing like I expected, so much better then it sounded! A glimpse at the nature of belief.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    In the preface to the 10th anniversary "author's preferred text" edition of "American Gods," Neil Gaiman says that his book seems to divide people who either really love it or really hate it. I would actually fall somewhere in the middle. "American Gods" will appeal strongly to some people, and may not appeal even to those who have enjoyed certain other of Gaiman's books. It is perhaps better viewed as a work of magical realism in the vein of Haruki Murakami than as what most people think of as fantasy, which it is often labelled. I found the concept incredibly intriguing: what happens to all the gods and mythical creatures that are a part of traditional life in the "old country" when immigrants come to America? I had the pleasure of hearing Neil Gaiman speak a few days ago, and he described having written about four pages of "The Graveyard Book" before deciding that the idea for the book was a better idea than he was a writer. He put the pages away and came back to the concept about ten years later. Perhaps "American Gods" is another idea that was just too big for Gaiman's talent at the time, or perhaps I was just a tad disappointed because his take on the book's concept is simply not what I thought it would be. It takes a long time, about 2/3 of the way through the 500+ page book, for the many frayed edges of the story to start to be woven back together. He incorporates elements of so many different religions and mythologies that it seems hard to imagine any author not struggling with such a gargantuan task. Especially near the end, the character perspective shifts frequently in ways that make it hard to keep up with whose inner monologue you are hearing. The twist at the end makes me feel like I would have to read this book a second time to go back and see if there were clues along the way that I didn't notice. At the same time, while the meandering style and massive character list make this a challenging book to get through, I enjoyed the reading process along the way. The book is being adapted for television, and it feels almost as if it were written to be suitable for an "X-Files" type of series, where each episode does not necessarily connect to every other, but there are overarching connections that you don't perceive instantly. If you need for all details to fit tightly together into a cohesive picture with a clean wrap-up at the end, then this is not your book. If you like being led to think and don't mind ending your thought process with more questions than answers, than this is quite possibly a book you will enjoy.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Typical Gaiman. Good.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    made me really enjoy all of his works, and expanded my imagination on the mythic god of everywhere
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I read the extended version and found it a little long.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I liked this book enough but not nearly as much as I wanted to like it. It took me a really long time to get into the book, at least 200 pages, and it took me months to finish. I was happy with the end but it was not something I would every choose to re-read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Gods take a road trip, visit the House on the Rock.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Loved it, and Shadow... it gives food for thought. Great characters, and a subject that makes you wonder who made who in religious creation myths. Well written, as always, and well read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An absolute delight, interesting, fascinating, thrilling. I love every second of it
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is why I love to read. Every once in a while, I find a story that fills me with wonder at every turn. This was an absolute joy to read.Oddly, the US security agents were not as fond of the book as I am, it went through more through scanning than my husband's laptop. One person even read five pages. Making sure it was a real book? Making sure there were no plots against actual American Gods? Or maybe she's managing to read her way through the whole book, one stop and search at a time.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Very good. I really liked this book quite a lot.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I loved it. The story, even though calling it just a story just isn't making it justice, was great, the characters are very catchy, it's not black and white, no fight between good and bad and the narrators are great. It was my first Gainman but certainly not the last. It's one of the books, that I'm just gonna miss for a while.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I would suggest going with the original cut down version. Great book, but it drags on at times.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Very good plot. Outstanding voice acting. The coming to America sections ripped my out of the story and I found myself skipping those portions to get back to the story.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    More than a decade after its writing, the story about immigrants' lives in the US is still very much relevant today.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Okay now I've had some time to digest this, and have started the "sequel." The story here really is a bit of a jumble. Several times I found myself sitting at trying to decipher what Gaiman was trying to say with some of his interludes. But it worked for me. Even when it made no sense, in a normal context. But then, the story is not in any semblance of a normal context.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The best audiobook I’ve ever had the pleasure of listening to. It deserves 5 stars. I should say that Gaiman’s writing does not. This, however, can be overlooked since it’s a wonderfully immersive experience in this format. Well worth your time.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I really couldn't get past the smut
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is an excellent reading of American Gods. I read this over fifteen years ago and with the disappointment of the final season of the show, this was a great way to re-experience one of Neil Gaiman's best. It may be time to revisit Anansi Boys next.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    American Gods is a slow, fragmented, eerie novel and yet an engrossing reading, a tale without loose ends and a cinematic description of American little cities and tiny corners (like the funeral parlor). American Gods eludes the genres classification, nor a fantasy, nor horror, nor science fiction book, even if won the 2002 Hugo, Nebula, Locus, SFX Magazine and Bram Stoker Awards. Is a great mix between a road novel, Kafka's tales and Pavese's Dialoghi con Leucò and still there is something missing, something unspoken whose alludes the “apocryphal scene” in the tenth edition:
    I’d been looking forward to writing the meeting of Shadow and Jesus for most of the book...And then I wrote their first scene together in chapter fifteen, and it didn’t work for me; I felt like I was alluding to something that I couldn’t simply mention in passing and then move on from. It was too big."
    I can't name it, only fell an absence.
    The meeting between Shadow and Jesus is my preferred citation from American Gods:
    “Have you thought about what it means to be a god?” asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. “It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people’s minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you’re a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.”
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    IT was a very weird story and is jumped from character to character
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wow. What a real tour de force. This novel kept me gripped through three whole days of driving and made the hours slip by. Great voice actors and as many twists and turns as the protagonists' journeys through America. I can't categorise it but I can certainly, wholeheartedly, recommend it!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It's taken me a few weeks since I finished American Gods to review it, because I'm not quite sure how much I liked it. Its tone is extremely different from Stardust and Neverwhere; it's very dark, dreary, and cold, and it's difficult to root for any of the characters. No one is entirely sympathetic, although it's not as if any of them have really done anything wrong.The premise of the novel is that as immigrants came to America, they brought their gods with them, and as America aged, its people no longer had a use for gods and abandoned them. It's fitting that the gods are now bleak and run-down. Shadow, the main character, is recruited by one of these gods to assist in a war against the newer gods - the gods of technology, highways, and the future. These newer gods are especially easy to dislike; they come across as sleazy and creepy.I think this one is going to need a re-read relatively soon. It's so much deeper than a novel about warring gods, and I think I was ill-prepared for it coming off of Gaiman's lighter fare. There are so many themes running through the plot that I think I might trip over them trying to sort them all out.Definitely recommended, but approach it expecting more than just a story.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Thoroughly disappointed with this one. I've heard so many fantastic things about Gaiman, but I just couldn't get into this book. In part, I think that the plot might have been just too far-fetched for me. What I was mostly struck by, however, was the mediocre quality of Gaiman's writing, which I was not at all expecting. His characters were so poorly developed, and such cookie-cutter, cliched representations of character stereotypes, that I could not find myself caring enough about them to muddle through. On top of that, the pacing was far too fast, and yet this book caps out at over 600 pages. And none of that the description that this book vitally needs? Definitely a disappontment. If it were just the plot, I would give another of Gaiman's novels a try, but I'm not so sure if the writing will improve in other books.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This story is so odd, it meanders, and intertwines, and plods, then careens forward. Overall I enjoyed it, the mixture of a road trip, and the dreamscape interludes that peek in along the way, and the Gods we learn about, it makes me want to learn more about them. So many different cultures have brought a mythos, or theos(?) and they've all found different ways to be, and to grow.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    There's no way I could ever review this book. On the surface, it's a book about Shadow and gods of other cultures. But it's so much more and yet it's just that. Gaiman has written a book that is extremely readable. However, the book is deep and inhaling the book isn't an option.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This wasn't my favorite of the Gaiman books I've read so far. I loved the first half, but didn't care as much for the last. The Wednesday con stories were great, and I loved the characters. I would have liked to have read even more about each of the Gods characters, they were wonderful. The whole concept was so interesting to me, all of the Gods of the past vs the current Gods of todays world. Well written and fast paced with all the quirkiness I've come to love in all of Gaiman's books.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was one of the best books I've ever read in my life. I highly recommend it to anybody.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It's an intense and interesting tale. It took a while for me to wrap my head around this book. The aspect of gods and how they live, what makes them is told in detail. It's nice to see the research on various gods and It's not entirely clear the need for the backstory on some gods.

    The twist ending, the realization of the need for the war alludes to the concept of Maya from the ancient Hindu texts but is underexplored.

    Overall this is a good fantasy read.