#14: Read "Good Omens"

In the Fall of 2011, I read/listened to (I’ve talked about my love of Audible.com before, haven’t I?) this book I’d heard a lot about called American Gods by Neil Gaiman.  I loved it – it was weird, creepy, erratic, smart, and beautifully written. I especially loved the settings Gaiman used, and the perfect way he described them. For example, one day in November I went for a walk in the forest at Eramosa Karst Conservation Area, and I took my phone along so I could listen to the book. It just so happened that as I walked through the cold November forest, I listened to a part where Shadow, the book’s main character, was also making his way through a cold forest, on the run…and Gaiman’s description was more vivid than my actual experience. That’s good writing.

sorta like this pic from http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexey-m/2211405659/

So, I became a Gaimanite. I think that is the term. Basically, I wanted to read anything that had “Neil Gaiman” somewhere on the cover. Next up was The Graveyard Book (loved it ), then Fragile Things (short story collection), then Neverwhere (not my favourite…but still better than many books I’ve read), then Anansi Boys (funnier than American Gods but same style, loved it.) 

When you read a book over 9 months it starts to look a little bit shabby... 

Next up was Good Omens, a collaboration with Terry Pratchett – aka. the guy in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section who has 4 whole shelves to himself full of books with crazy cartoony covers.

I’d heard great things. It is fantasy that is meant to be more funny than epic quest-y, and a couple of my friends even said it is one of their favourite books.

Here’s the deal: so there is an angel, and a demon. And, yeah, they are on opposite sides of the war for human souls and whatnot, but like, that doesn’t mean that they can’t work together sometimes. They even kind of sort of like each other, even though the demon is a slick leather-wearing 80’s bad boy stereotype and the angel is a prissy, antiquated bookworm. Anyways – they both end up getting to work on a project – the project of raising up the Antichrist and ensuring that the Apocalypse, the final battle between Heaven and Hell, can come about. But neither is very good at their job, and they lose the wee bebe Antichrist. Misplace. And very British humour-y hijinks ensue.

Now, I’m pretty firmly a Gaiman fan, that’s not going to change. But…I have to say, this wasn’t my favourite book. I’ve never really read much comedy fiction before, and what I have read I wasn’t all that into (namely, a book called Gods Behaving Badly, which coincidentally is basically the exact same premise as American Gods but is fairly terrible). Some parts were quite funny – especially the dialogue between little bitty Antichrist and his little gang of English children.

I can’t put my finger on why, but I just couldn’t get into this book. It took me probably 8 or 9 months to finish, and it’s really not that long or anything (in the meantime, I finished the Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller; Room by Emma Donahue; Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson; Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn; 14 by Peter Clines;  Mercy by Julie Garwood and Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Fowler, and yes I enjoyed bragging about that list)

It’s not like Good Omens was bad. Not at all! I didn’t like the focus on the jokes. The story was interesting, but now that I’ve finished it I can’t really remember what exactly happened between page 1 and page 398 because it was broken up so many times by joke scenes or by Prachett’s characteristic satirical footnotes to the text. I think I mean that it seemed a bit like a jumble of ideas and characters and jokes that never really came together to make me care about finishing the story.

Still though – everyone go read American Gods and the Graveyard Book and Anansi Boys and probably the Ocean at the End of the Lane (of which I am on page 122) and Stardust (which is next up on my Audible app)