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I Just Finished....

True Grit by Charles Portis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Rereading this book--great decision. I loved Mattie cause I knew so few other interesting, clever, heroic girls in any books that I read in 8th or 9th grade. But here she was, clever and funny (even if she did not know it) and she had true grit. True grit.
Now I reread it and discovered what it was that that gave her grit. Portis' genius with dialogue and his consummate talent for research made this book so authentic, so genuine, that I bow before his talent and skill. He did not set out to write a Western, he set out to write a true book. A true book. It just happened to be a great Western too. Read it.

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I Just Finished.......

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I loved this book. I read it so fast that I am planning a second read in about six months because I could feel all the detail and poetry I was missing as I sped through it. There was no possibility of slowing down,though, I had to know as fast as I could what the journey meant and how much like a hero journey, a la Campbell's monomyth, it was going to be. I read this with #1b1t and was unable to stick to the timeline, like many others.
Best part of the book had to be the protagonist: Shadow's ignorance of his own identity, even his own name (isn't that how most of us travel through life?), and his steadfast love for Laura, his dogged pursuit of a good, pure future for himself, the everyman aspects of his character. I read an interview with Neil Gaiman once in which he mentioned that he was a pretty "facile writer," and that he did not want to rely on that in his writing. The style was smooth, for sure, but Mr. Gaiman can really tell a story.
The bewilderment of the English writer transplanted when confronted by the chaotic mess that is "American" mythology was great--next read, I will focus on the new American gods more intently. There were so few of them next to the original, immigrant gods, that I missed some, I know. I did think the plotting was uneven--maybe the mix of novel and epic was too much for one book. You've got to go for the archetypes, yet I want characterization as well. Shadow was drawn so carefully, but some of the gods were just sketches. I'd like to read the book with my World Lit class, but am not sure how to navigate through Bilquis. (jeez, did those have to be the most specific accurate scenes in the whole book??)
Still working on who the forgotten god is------did some research along with my #1b1t cohort, but still have a short list of 3. check out @1B1T2010 for info. Here's a link to the notes I kept and links I copied: http://bit.ly/bp4vOn while reading.

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