yeah, but it's fun to know which bits are fragments and which bits he made up if i'd known more about, say, german folklore, i would have been able to get one of the plot threads much earlier, for example.
freaky - i just finished it a couple of weeks ago too.
I was wondering if he'd made a bunch up cos i read it with a copy of the huge tome "dictionary of phrase and fable" "starlore handbook" "world mythology" and a bunch of other books of tims by my side. it was pretty cool to be able to read up on some of the gods, but like, bilquis was never in there. maybe traditionally she goes under a different name. even with all those books there you didn't get much info cos history of world faith and all that must be a massive topic, like, was more than a degree's worth - so even the biggest of the books had little more than a paragraph on each character.
Terrifyingly, I finished it on the 2nd of July too. It's pretty awesome, but some of the American turns of phrase pissed me off, mostly because I'm a linguistic bigot.
Also, it was pretty fun trying to guess the gods before you were told their real names.
Don't knock the Americanisms, Gaiman had to work hard to get them there. ;)
Yeah, I wasn't very good at that. But at least I figured out that Wednesday was Odin before someone actually called him that, so could be more hopeless. Will probably warrant re-reading sometime - found it a very dense and slow book to read (as you can see I read my next book in basically the rest of that day...)
Wow, I never realised who Shadow was either. I thought he was just a person. I really have to re-read it - I'm waiting for a friend to finish.
Odin/Wednesday made it very easy for me to recognise Odin in another book (well, series) - Stephen Donaldson's Gap Series. I couldn't be sure of anyone else in it though.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2005-07-02 08:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-03 02:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-02 02:45 pm (UTC)I was wondering if he'd made a bunch up cos i read it with a copy of the huge tome "dictionary of phrase and fable" "starlore handbook" "world mythology" and a bunch of other books of tims by my side. it was pretty cool to be able to read up on some of the gods, but like, bilquis was never in there. maybe traditionally she goes under a different name. even with all those books there you didn't get much info cos history of world faith and all that must be a massive topic, like, was more than a degree's worth - so even the biggest of the books had little more than a paragraph on each character.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-02 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-03 02:16 pm (UTC)Also, it was pretty fun trying to guess the gods before you were told their real names.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-03 02:26 pm (UTC)Yeah, I wasn't very good at that. But at least I figured out that Wednesday was Odin before someone actually called him that, so could be more hopeless. Will probably warrant re-reading sometime - found it a very dense and slow book to read (as you can see I read my next book in basically the rest of that day...)
no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 09:25 am (UTC)Odin/Wednesday made it very easy for me to recognise Odin in another book (well, series) - Stephen Donaldson's Gap Series. I couldn't be sure of anyone else in it though.