Tuesday, May 4, 2010

#1B1T

That is: "One Book, One Twitter"... essentially just a Twitter based book club. It appears Neil Gaiman's American Gods won the vote and will be read simultaneously by however many thousands of followers they can gather on Twitter. Normally this kind of thing doesn't interest me, but I really like American Gods... perhaps my favorite Gaiman book (Anansi Boys would be the main competitor)... I like it more the Neverwhere, more than The Graveyard Book, more than Coraline, and more than Good Omens... I don't have anything else I'm burning to read right now... and I haven't re-read the book in a couple of years probably. Interestingly, Mr. Gaiman himself is somewhat concerned that his book is divisive:
As an author, I'm half-pleased and half-not, mostly because American Gods is such a divisive sort of book. Some people love it, some sort of like it, and some people hate it. (As contrasted with, say, The Graveyard Book, which some people love, some like, and a statistically insignificant number of people hate.) It's not a book I'd hand out to everyone, because the people who don't know anything about what I've written and who hate it -- who might have loved Stardust, or Neverwhere, or The Graveyard Book or Sandman -- probably won't go and look any further.

Personally, I think most of the "divisiveness" comes from the fact that it was a major departure from his earlier work, and thus it disappointed some hardcore fans who just wanted him to write Neverwhere sequels and more Sandman comics until the end of time. I think anyone who comes into this book without the biases of a Gaiman fanboi is going to come out really pleased... or at least not feel that their time reading it was ill spent.

Anyway, I've got a Twitter account for the purposes of following what famous people have to say in 140 characters or less... so it won't be hard to tack on 1B1T2010.

UPDATE: They've posted the reading/discussion schedule.

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