Now in print: Neil Gaiman's "novelistic" book of Norse mythos

For about 30 years…yeah.

Wash your mouth out with soap!

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I will say that Anansi Boys was impossible for me to finish. I really really disliked the main character, though from what i hear the book greatly improves after a certain point but as much as i read and pushed i never got to that point and gave up.

I wonder how the novel fits in with Gaiman’s take on Thor from the Sandman series.

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Personally, I never Tyr of them.

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That’s a Baldr faced falsehood, :wink:

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Oh, you’re Fulla baloney.

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Just tell us when you Valhalla nuff of the puns.

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I told him he should get the Iris Elba tattoo. I’m not sure I really sold it though. :slight_smile:

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We don’t want to Skadhi newcomers off or be a Bor here. It Snotra nice Thing to do, anyway and there’s too Mani puns. So, Idun.

And if you want any more Norse puns, you can Havamal.

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I’ve been Munin to ask if y’all were out yet.

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At least he found out before he got the tattoo.

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What are you raven’ about? You’ll rune it for everybody.

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Well, you tried.

Now see, you could try again and suggest a word balloon with “We are cancelling Ragnarok”. You know, for that crossover appeal.

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Oh heck. I read about him in RE/Search’s Modern Primitives many years ago (around the same time I was reading Boing Boing in print) but I had no idea that he died. A quixotic mission for sure but worthwhile IMHO. Maybe give it another couple of centuries.

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I just showed him that!

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This is definitely true. I knew the racist folks were into it, but jeez, they are really into it. I also found out that there are a lot of racist pinterest boards? Like that is a thing? There is an ugly underbelly to pinterest.

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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.)

@dfaris, 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.

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