I have read two of Gaiman’s young adult novels, Coraline and The Graveyard Book, but I had not read any of his adult novels until this one. American Gods has been getting some press lately because of its 10 year anniversary and a brand new dramatized audio book to celebrate it. However, I chose to read the paper edition I bought at Half Price Books.

At the beginning of the story, the main character Shadow is close to being released from prison. Unbeknownst to him, his parole date gets moved up and he is flying home to be with his wife Laura. While on the plane he meets a strange man named Wednesday who offers him a job, tells him that Laura just died in a car accident with the man Shadow was supposed to be working for when he was released from prison. Shadow now basically has no choice but to work for Wednesday.

Then some really strange things begin to happen. Wednesday takes Shadow to a diner where he meets a tall, drunk Leprechaun who pulls a gold coin out of the air and gives it to Shadow (one of Shadow’s hobbies is coin tricks). The Leprechaun and Shadow also get into a fight so that Wednesday can judge Shadow’s worth. When Shadow reaches his destination, he attends Laura’s funeral and throws the gold coin into the grave. That night Laura visits Shadow in his motel room with dirt under her fingers and smelling of rotten flesh. Laura ends up making several appearances to Shadow through out the course of the book and even has a role to play in the climax of the story.

Shadow takes Wednesday’s job offer which means driving him and doing other odd jobs for him. They begin heading for House on the Rock in North Dakota, a seedy tourist roadside attraction where they are supposed to meet some people. Once there, there is a very memorable scene of a carousel spinning around into another world. It is there that it hits home for Shadow who these people really are, old-world gods. Wednesday is Odin and there is also Anansi, the spider, Czernobog, an Eastern European god kind of like Thor with a sledgehammer and they meet Mr. Ibis and Jacquel later. Wednesday is trying to get all of these gods together in order to prepare for a battle between the old gods and the new gods (modern society, computers, Internet) represented by Mr. World, Mr. Town, and others who are doggedly on their tail throughout the book. It is explained better in the book, I’m trying to not give too much away.

Scattered throughout the book are small chapters entitled “Coming to America”. These were about settlers coming from the old world to the Americas or in one case slaves stuck in a tight ship hold coming from Africa. Another one is about an Arab man who has been in America a week and tries to sell little doo-dads but won’t get anyone to talk to him. He gets in a cab and at one point at a stop, he thinks the driver has fallen asleep. He brushes his hand against the driver accidentally knocking off his sunglasses discovering that the driver is a Jinn or Arab genie. The stories common to all of these little side chapters are that the old-world gods somehow made it to America.

I thought this novel was interesting and definitely a different take on American spirituality including the Native American gods and the old Pagan European gods but excluding the Christian God or Jesus who weren’t mentioned at all. I don’t know if I would call it a page-turner. I didn’t get so bored with it I wanted to quit, but also it did take me several months to read it because I could only read a few pages at a time. It was good which is about where I would leave it.

Defending The Enemy is a combination memoir/travelogue that chronicles its author’s time in Japan, as she worked with the legal team defending Japanese men who had been accused of war crimes after World War II. Elaine Schmidt arrived in Japan and was assigned to a military secretarial pool. She had aspirations of working as a lawyer, and she knew that the secretarial gigs were a dead end. She managed to get assigned to one of the attorneys working on the defense team. From there, she spent many long days helping to build a defense for the accused.
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This was a short 5 hour audiobook that my wife and I listened to on the way to and back from the Texas coast this past weekend. It is narrated by Tina Fey herself and the book was pretty funny. You could definitely tell that she is a comedy writer because she would offer several variations on a particular joke and there were jokes and humorous anecdotes throughout. The book also seems to be aimed more to women than men because at one point she says that if you are a man who bought this book, “Thank you”.

Tina Fey talks about everything from working at a theater company during the summer as a teenager, her first job at the YMCA, auditioning and then making it to the famous Second City Improv group in Chicago, her stint at Saturday Night Live, and writing for and acting in her series 30 Rock. Along the way she talks about her dad who was a wonderful father figure and role model for her as well as what it is like to be a mother herself. She does spend quite a bit of time talking about breast feeding and other aspects of parenthood.

Some of the highlights of the audiobook (as opposed to the print version) is that the Saturday Night Live sketch where she first played Sarah Palin is featured in its entirety. In fact that whole episode of her life where she became super famous playing Palin because of the similarity of their appearance was one of the more interesting parts of the book. I also thought some of the behind-the-scenes stories of getting 30 Rock off the ground was kind of interesting also.

Overall I thought it was an enjoyable book; I laughed quite a bit throughout. It was a good short road trip kind of audiobook to listen to. My biggest problem with the audiobook was some of Tina Fey’s narration. She would slip in some theatrical “asides” that came across as mumbles that I really couldn’t understand. However, that is my only complaint with the book.

I listened to this book in audio format from Audible.com and this is the kind of book that I could only read by listening to. It was a really interesting book, but there were enough dry patches that if I were reading this in print, I probably would have given up on it. Two things made this book great as an audiobook; first was the reader and his slight Southern drawl which really captured the Texan, Alan Lomax and the other thing that made this book great was that there were some of Alan Lomax’s original field recordings interspersed here and there within the book which was cool because you could hear some of the folk music that Alan Lomax is famous for recording.

Alan Lomax was a folk song collector, ethnomusicologist, radio and TV producer, a freelancer for the Library of Congress and researcher of American folklore particularly music and later dance. His father John Lomax Sr. was also a folk song collector and wowed academic audiences in the 1920′s with his lectures at Universities on the folk songs he collected in the fields. Alan Lomax joined his father on these early recording expeditions to East Texas plantations, prisons and prison farms, and juke joints. When Alan finished his schooling at the University of Texas, he set out on his own to make recordings. He started out in the Southern U.S and encountered racism and even arrest for being a white man hanging out in black neighborhoods and bars. He was with a prominent African American writer of that time Zora Neal Hurston who was able to bail him out of these predicaments. After touring the South, he went to Haiti and recorded sea chanteys including an early version of Sloop John B which was played in the book. He also recorded a lot on land in Haiti including children’s games and other folk music.

Lomax never made much money at what he did and was often broke and plagued with self-doubt as to whether he should really be travelling all over and recording folk music (in the 30s he recorded everything for the Folk Music Archives at the Library of Congress). Alan subsisted most of his life on grant money from foundations such as Carnegie or The National Endowment for the Humanities. In the late 30′s Lomax made one of his seminal recordings which was an extended interview session with one of the early jazz greats Jellyroll Morton. Morton claimed to have been an inventor of jazz which some critics dispute and labeled him a braggart, but there was no question he was an important figure in early jazz music. During World War II he began working for radio and came up with ideas to bring a kind of National unity through folk music bringing along his friends like folk singers Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives and Pete Seeger. In fact his relationship with the Seegers and his political leanings on issues related to the average American people roused the interest of the FBI who suspected he may be a communist.

In the 50′s at the height of McCarthyism Alan was overseas recording the folk music of Spain, England, and Scotland. When he returned to America in the mid-1950′s Rock ‘n Roll was in full swing. Alan had a hand in helping to bring about the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island and during the 60′s had an interest in using folk music to foster social justice during the Civil Rights era. During the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s Alan came up with several anthropological methods of coding folk music performers using several measuring systems. When he was in Europe in the 50′s, he figured out that people from different regions typically used different vowel placements in the mouth for singing. For example, people in the south of Italy placed the vowels in the front of their mouths and in northern Italy people placed the vowels in the backs of their mouths. In the 80′s he started analyzing dance patterns and movements and came out with a measuring system based on that as well.

Alan Lomax died in 2002, but one of the fascinating things about this book is how devoted he was to American culture and preserving it with recordings and later video. He was also ahead of his time on some things. In the 80′s he wanted to develop a global jukebox where people could hear whatever they wanted whenever they wanted using what we know now as metadata. With the advent of iTunes and now Spotify and similar services we basically have this global jukebox to hear whatever we want.