Eating and reading

I'm listening to Neil Gaiman's American Gods in the car lately. It's one of my favorite books, but I had forgotten quite a bit of it, and keep being surprised by parts that I'd forgotten. Almost three years ago, when I first read it, I wrote:

Shadow, the protagonist, is released from prison in the first few pages. He's just finished doing three years for bank robbery--keeping his head down, not making waves, just doing his time until he can get out and return to his wife, Laura. But the day before he's to be released, Laura is killed in an automobile accident, so he gets out of prison with nowhere to go, and no one to return to.

Through a series of apparent coincidences, he hooks up with Wednesday, a conman who turns out to be Odin, one of the old gods who were brought to America in the minds and hearts of immigrants from the old countries. Laura continues to make appearances throughout the book--Shadow unwittingly brings her back to life through a leprechaun's mistake, and she keeps showing up to help him when he gets into tough places.

I'm about half-way through the book right now. My favorite part so far has been the sequence about the Egyptian gods who currently run a funeral home in Cairo . . . Georgia. Ibis and Jacquel's is a pretty standard small-town funeral home--Ibis does the sales part and Jacquel does the embalming. Set disappeared two hundred years ago, Horus has gone mad and remains in his guise as a hawk, and Bast, in the form of a small brown cat, sleeps in her basket in the kitchen and comes to Shadow in his dreams.

George Guidall is the narrator, and he does a wonderful job, just perfect for the book. Every time I hear him read something, I remember all of the Tony Hillerman novels that he narrated, and that I listened to, one after the other, several years ago. He's connected in my mind to those books, so somehow I always think of the Southwest when I hear him, even though, of course American Gods is set in the Midwest.

I had forgotten about the whole funeral home part of the book -- actually I've forgotten most of the book, which is actually quite wonderful: I get to experience it all over again.

And to me, it's so interesting to hear a book read rather than read it myself, because I pick up on so much more, I think. It has to be when I'm driving, though, or so it seems. I have to be able to actively listen, and really pay attention. But for me, it's a much more "detailed" way of experiencing a book. I'm a fast reader, and I really don't pay very close attention. In school, they probably would say that I don't retain very well. I mean, if it's important I do, but if I'm just reading for pleasure, I just read to pass the time, and for enjoyment, and that's about it.

I really love this book, and the whole time I'm listening to it, I'm thinking that this is the kind of book I would love to write. It's so much fun, yet so intricate. Just a delight to read (or listen to).

I haven't been reading a lot lately, unfortunately. I've spent so much time on the new computer over the past couple of weeks, and my last few evenings have been spent with my Sims. So it doesn't make a lot of sense that I have three books in my "Reading" list over in the sidebar. And it should actually be four -- I'm also reading Llewellyn's 2005 Tarot Reader, which is a planner for next year, but filled with a lot of very fun and interesting tarot articles.

Now You See It is a book that I picked up in the bookstore a couple of weeks ago, and that looked interesting. It's about a man who wakes up one morning to find his wife has disappeared. That's the one I've been carrying around with me to read if I find myself waiting somewhere, or for a few minutes while I'm eating my lunch at work. I've also started Jodi Picoult's Second Glance, a Vermont ghost story about a man who keeps trying (and failing) to kill himself so he can join his fianceé.

Unlucky in Law is what I'm reading at home, mostly during dinner. I have a book stand and I prop a book up on it and read while I eat dinner. Reading while I eat is about the most reading I've been doing lately. I really need to get back to doing more just reading, especially since I can hold a cat at the same time, and Dinah likes that.