American Gods tops the list of books that I wish I could read for the first time once again. There's a storm coming, and in the middle is a man named Shadow: ex-con, recently widowed, working for the mysterious Mr. Wednesday. Shadow's dropped into a world where beings live on belief, where magic and ritual are real, and the dead are rarely gone. Gaiman's gods are very fallible supernatural beings, curmudgeons and mystics who drink, smoke, and feed off the scraps of belief left to them. America is a bad place for the gods; the Old World creatures are shambling shells of past glories, the new gods of Media, Technology, and the Spookshow (among others) anxious mayflies trembling before the winds of obsolescence.

It's a wonder how Gaiman blends the mythology of dozens of cultures with an utterly plausible explanation of how gods work, of their symbiotic relationship with people, and why America is such a terrible place for them to live. This combination of the fantastic and the logical is one of the joys of the book, along with Gaiman's evident skill as a wordsmith, and the lengthy and convoluted plot around the war of the gods. I enjoyed the frequent digressions into the lives of other goods, their journey to America with immigrants beyond the Ellis Island stereotypes.

I think this book opens some very interesting questions about the nature of belief, the necessity of having ideas and dreams about the universe, and the way that myths change shape in new contexts. That said, it is at times in love with how clever it is, and the Lakeside sanctuary plot is as slow and dull as I remembered it.