{"id":13,"date":"2006-01-05T10:54:39","date_gmt":"2006-01-05T10:54:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.akumaprime.com\/?p=13"},"modified":"2014-09-30T21:52:22","modified_gmt":"2014-09-30T21:52:22","slug":"american-gods-c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/akumaprime.com\/?p=13","title":{"rendered":"American Gods: C+"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Neil Gaiman invoked the name of Roger Zelazny in his For section. Why he did this, I can only speculate. But by doing this, he staked a claim. He stated that his book, would live up to the name of the great Zelazny, and it just didn&#8217;t. His characters weren&#8217;t as full, his story not as complex or opaque. That&#8217;s not to say it wasn&#8217;t a decent book.<\/p>\n<p>If Tiger Woods called a hole in one, then no matter how amazing a drive he has, if he doesn&#8217;t get that hole in one, he fails. Don&#8217;t name your son Winner, and don&#8217;t invoke the name of great people before you do something. It just invites you to stand in their shadow.<\/p>\n<p>I will give you one passage I felt was particularly good:<br \/>\n     <em>&#8221; I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren&#8217;t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they&#8217;re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen &#8211; I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is ging to come back and kick everyone&#8217;s ass. I  believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink in the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve in to madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we&#8217;ll all be wiped out by the comon cold like the Martians in War f the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last centry were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that Jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind&#8217;s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it&#8217;s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there&#8217;s a cat in a box somewhere who&#8217;s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don&#8217;t ever open the box to feed it it&#8217;ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn&#8217;t even know that I&#8217;m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck, I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn&#8217;t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what&#8217;s going on will lie about the little things too. I beliveve in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman&#8217;s right to choose, a baby&#8217;s right to life, that while all human life is sacred there&#8217;s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happenes when you&#8217;re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.&#8221; She stopped, out of breath.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>     If Neil Gaiman hadn&#8217;t invoked the name of a Giant, I would have given it a B-.  But because it was a little slow, the characters a little obvious&#8230; There was one plot twist I didn&#8217;t see coming but&#8230; it just wasn&#8217;t enough. I won&#8217;t be reading his sequel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Neil Gaiman invoked the name of Roger Zelazny in his For section. Why he did this, I can only speculate. But by doing this, he staked a claim. He stated that his book, would live up to the name of the great Zelazny, and it just didn&#8217;t. His characters weren&#8217;t as full, his story not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/akumaprime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/akumaprime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/akumaprime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akumaprime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akumaprime.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/akumaprime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/akumaprime.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akumaprime.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akumaprime.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}