In case anyone was wondering, I will briefly attempt to drag the conversation back to the book. I’m about 2/5 of the way through it and enjoying it greatly.
It’s being promoted as “novelistic”, which is sort of misleading. Gaiman is trying to be faithful to the material, which is kind of fragmentary to begin with. He’s not making up stuff to tie different episodes together. So far, it’s read a lot more like a collection of short stories with some background information at the beginning. I guess that’s a little harder to sell. It’s not novelistic in that there’s a grand sweeping narrative, but it’s written in an easy-to-read style where the characters talk more or less like normal people (“Shut up, Thor,” said Loki.)
@anon36155390, the pace is quite brisk. Gaiman isn’t padding things out at all so far. If anything, there’s spots where he’s saved us a lot of reading through extraneous information. I’ve read most of the Eddas (I think I kinda spaced out half-way through the Poetic Edda), and there are places where you get stuff like, “Then X, who is also called Y because of the thing that he did to the giants, when he fought against the trolls, took up his weapon Z, so-called because it does the thing that makes it cool. Because he wields Z, men call him the Z-wielder and Troll-Slayer.” That all gets trimmed down. We get the information we need, but it’s inserted a little more deftly.
All that to say, if you like this sort of thing, and I’m assuming you do because you’re reading this thread, it’s a good book.
