Can't put down ( )

American Gods, for all its massive weight, has got to be one of my favourite books, and one that I’ve re-read the most over the years - the story is just *that* compelling and well-wrought. I devoured the First Edition in high school, was super stoked at the extra content in the Author’s Preferred Edition, obsessed over the tv release, and was over the moon when they announced that it was time to release this Annotated Edition. Yet, for all of my excitement (and maybe because I was over-hyped), actually reading this edition was a bit… off. Gaiman claims in the introduction that one of the reasons he agreed to this release was that both of his wives (first and second, let’s not get sidetracked) felt that they didn’t quite understand the book on its own. I’ve heard quite a few people make the same complaint, usually with the excuse that the story winds and wefts its way over too much ground (physical American landscape and psychological flaming hoops) and they can’t come to grips with the myriad of references to pantheons of gods and goddesses (and in some cases obscure 1990s Americana). Ironically, I never found this to affect my reading of American Gods; I either knew what the references meant the first time around, or didn’t and Googled/libraried my way to knowledge. Obviously subsequent re-readings always gave me more knowledge to work with, and each re-read revealed different themes and undertones as the story related to different phases of my life, with the ending inevitably leaving me surprised (even though I know exactly what’s going to happen). The Annotated Edition did fill in some gaps as I was reading, since I can’t claim to know every reference out there, but after finishing the book (again) I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t actually *need* to know everything as I’m reading and sometimes it bugged me to be constantly interrupted while I’m lost in the story. From a scholarly perspective, though, I think that the book is definitely needed as a quick-ref guide, and as much as I REALLY don’t care which specific sentences/words were in the First Edition vs. Author’s Preferred Edition, I can see this being an extremely useful tool for serious critiques of the novel. Would I recommend this book to a first time reader of Shadow’s story? Absolutely not. But I’m still glad that this compendium is out there in the universe for us Gaiman nerds to get excited about. And besides: it’s one more step towards (urban) fantasy novels being taken seriously as capital-L Literature! ( )