American Gods > Anansi Boys > Any Twilight or Teenage Fantasy Love Story NovelGaiman’s sequel to American Gods doesn’t disappoint. It may not be as good as the first, but it has its own unique charm. Where American Gods was dark and heavy, Anansi Boys is light and comical, that is without losing the trademark Gaiman enchantment. It’s still about gods, but it’s more down to earth and is more invested on the humanistic aspect of things. The protagonist is a guy named Fat Charlie, the son of Anansi, the Spider god, who meets his long lost magical brother on the day his father dies. From there the story unravels and the bond between the two siblings develops as Fat Charlie learns to become his own man. It’s still filled with deities, magic, songs**, and dreams ensuring a good time. But what really makes it entertaining is Gaiman’s humor, its hilarious commentary reminiscent of a more polished Rick Riordan. I can’t remember the last time I was having this much fun reading something. Probably Catch-22 was the last; that is discounting that idiot’s guide to rednecks I read the other day which isn’t really a novel. But if you like fantasy novels then give this a go. You’ll have a hard time putting this down; which is also one way of saying that you’ll have a grand time. P.S.I was pretty bummed when I learned that Anansi is a spider god. You see, I have a really complicated relationship with spiders. I like spiders and yet hate them at the same time. It’s like my relationship with women. I like some and hate some, but then that may be a totally wrong comparison. Who was it that said never compare women to spiders? Was that Spiderman? Could be Jay Leno, could be Rosie’s mum. Anyway, recall that giant spider from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, or if you’re old and can’t relate to that reference, just imagine a really big-ass spider. That’s some scary shit right there. Imagine those sets of eyes, those hairy legs and that abdomen filled with venom. My wet dream! I mean, that’s a dream that would make me wet my bed. Then, there’s the prospect of playing with them, err… the spiders, I mean. In my country, playing with spiders is a really big thing especially with young boys. We’d catch or buy spiders (Yes, some people sold spiders for a living.) put them in matchboxes and feed them grasshoppers or flies or whatever insects we could get our hands on. Then we’d get a stick and place two spiders at each opposing end and watch them come to the center and fight to the death. YOLO. The winning spider would always end up wrapping the defeated with web and eating it. It’s a really fun thing to watch. A death match and cannibalism all balled up into one? There’s nothing more attractive to a pre-adolescent blockhead! Of course, I had spiders, but I never handled them. I couldn’t stand it. My brother was the one who managed my spiders for me. Clarification, my little brother did that. I owe a lot of things to that little guy. I was a bit more sensitive, he was the fearless guy who touched anything, and I mean literally anything. That guy touched my poop. There wasn’t a single delicate bone in his body. But that was when he was young and stupid. I love you, bro. It’s something similar to Fat Charlie and Spider’s relationship, the older sibling always looked to the younger one for help. Of course, we grew up and I found my confidence and became my own man. I’m not scared of you spiders no more! ‘cept for dem Black widows. That shit could kill ya. But my thing about spiders is I love the idea, but can’t stand the actual thing. It’s something like Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s about sex; I mean deep down everybody likes sex. So why does everybody hate on the novel? People should love the idea of sex, why’d they hate the book? Could be because of the hating bandwagon, a lot people get carried away by peer pressure. But I think it’s really just because the book is horrible. The idea seems nice, but the actual thing is yuck. Who’d want that? We can’t use a proxy and make our little brothers read it for us so that they can tell us about all the sex parts. That’s twisted. Therefore let’s all make a pact to ignore the Fifty Shades of Grey movie, right guys? *awkward silence* Let’s all make a pact to ignore spiders? *cheers* Hmmm… Surely, there are alternatives like in the case of Fifty Shades, the alternative of the book is the movie *cheers* and in the case of spider fighting, I did find MMA and Boxing. I mean, sure the statistical probability of an in-game death is pretty low but it can still get bloody. And yeah, there’s no cannibalism. Boo! No victor gets to eat the defeated kind of thing. But, hey, you can’t have everything in life. The violence still gives a kick, and yeah, and in this case, size makes up for shortcomings. Hehe. Don’t think I’m twisted and stupid. But, yeah, maybe I am. I’m half sarcastic and half not. I just like seeing bloody stuff sometimes. Ewwwww, No!!!! I’m not a vampire-loving teenage fatalist. Maybe the part of me that’s a god demands sacrifice or something. Haha! I kid only. I digress. I like this novel because it’s fun and entertaining. I think that’s all that matters. Footnotes** songs“It begins, as most things begin, with a song. In the beginning, after all, were the words, and they came with the tune. That was how the world was made, how the void was divided, how the lands and the stars and the dreams and the little gods and the animals, how all of them came into the world. They were sung.”“Each person whoever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody; it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.”I cannot tell you about my “song”, nor can you tell me about yours. But I think the closest that we can do is tell each other our favorite songs. Here’s my top five in no particular order:1. Under Cover of Darkness – The Strokes2. Angel – Sarah Mclachlan3. Claire de lune – Claude Debussy4. Yellow – Coldplay5. Meditation from Thais – Jules MassenetI know that my favorite songs cannot make worlds or animals or even little gods, but I know songs are important and I hope that it makes your day. (Feel free to share your favorite songs too.)
It's remarkable, really, how long I was permitted to exist without reading Neil Gaiman. In retrospect, I suppose it's a good thing that I didn't read any of his books until college - had I been exposed to his work in high school, the result would have been a near-obsession filled with pages of awful fanfiction and an emotional meltdown when I learned that Mr. Gaiman is happily married. But this didn't happen, thankfully. My first Neil Gaiman book was American Gods, and when my roommate (a much more dedicated fan than me) recommended it, she added that although the book was good, Anansi Boys was better. I started reading this one with some trepidation, as I was convinced that nothing could ever be as good as American Gods, but to my delight, I was proven wrong. Sometimes, you read a book and know you're going to love it by the end of the first chapter. Sometimes you know after the first paragraph. With Anansi Boys, I knew at the dedication. It goes like this:"You know how it is. You pick up a book, flip to the dedication, and find that, once again, the author has dedicated the book to someone else and not to you.Not this time. Because we haven't yet met/have only a glancing acquaintance/are just crazy about each other/haven't seen each other in much too long/are in some way related/will never meet, but will, I trust, despite that, always think fondly of each other...This one's for you.With you know what, and you probably know why."Someone fetch me a fainting couch and some smelling salts, I need to swoon for a moment. Ok, I'm back. Anyway, what I really liked about this book was it just focused on a small group of people. American Gods, this book's predecessor-but-not-exactly-prequel, was a sprawling epic with tons of characters and rules and the fate of the entire world and then some depended on the ending coming off right. Anansi Boys takes that same world, one in which the gods are still alive and living among us, and zeroes in on just a couple of characters: the trickster god Anansi's two adult sons, one of whom has grown up knowing his father is a god, the other who is unaware of this. The stakes are still high, of course, and battles must be fought before the end, but the scope of the novel wasn't as expansive and exhausting as American Gods. You don't necessarily have to read one before the other, but it certainly couldn't hurt. I forgot to mark the good passages in my copy, so here are three random excerpts from the pages I remember off the top of my head:"Like all sentient beings, Fat Charlie had a weirdness quotient. For some days the needle had been over in the red, occasionally banging jerkily against the pin. Now the meter broke. From this moment on, he suspected, nothing would surprise him. He could no longer be outweirded. He was done. He was wrong, of course." "Fat Charlie tried to remember what people did in prison to pass the time, but all he could come up with was keeping secret diaries and hiding things in their bottoms. He had nothing to write on, and felt that a definite measure of how well one was getting on in life was not having to hide things in one's bottom.Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbott and Costello meet the Wolfman.""Maybe Anansi's just some guy from a story, made up back in Africa in the dawn days of the world by some boy with blackfly on his leg, pushing his crutch in the dirt, making up some goofy story about a man made of tar. Does that change anything? People respond to the stories. They tell them themselves. The stories spread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers. Because now the folks who never had any thought in their head but how to run from lions and keep far enough away from rivers that the crocodiles don't get an easy meal, now they're starting to dream about a whole new place to live. The world may be the same, but the wallpaper's changed."
What do You think about Anansi Boys (2006)?
The book begins, as most things do, with a song--karaoke in fact. Bad karaoke of the kind only fun with large amounts of alcohol and friends (or blonde, buxom women) who sing just as bad as you do with just as much drunken enthusiasm.When we left Mr. Nancy (nan-cee from A-nan-si--get it? Gaiman: You. Me. Mad Gab match.) in American Gods he was winding down with Shadow at a karaoke bar. With Anansi Boys, Mr. Nancy--now, I'm-not-hiding-my-Godness-Anansi, we learn, has 2 children, only one whose genetic inheritance included the god-factor, the other (Charlie) is quite normal. Charlie is so normal, he's grown up chubby and earned a nickname for it: Fat Charlie. There's none of this god-nonsense for Fat Charlie. No puff of smoke or wave your hand and fat-be-gone. Oh no. He, just like everyone else, had to work hard to get the fat off. It's the name that's stuck. He lives with the constant embarrassment of his father (Guess who came up with 'Fat Charlie'. Go on. Guess.) who loves to make bad jokes, loves having a good time (at the expense of others) and ultimately opens up one of the worst possible chapters of Charlie's life.After Anansi's death, Charlie discovers he has a brother. In typical Gaiman fashion, Charlie summons Spider (the brother) into his English home by putting in a request with a spider outside his front door. Spider then proceeds to completely take over Charlie's life. He dates his fiancée, gets him fired, arrested, and further rouses the suspicions of an already wary mother-in-law-to-be. The first half of the novel is witty and entertaining, but when Charlie finally gets fed up he calls on the forces of Mrs. Dunwiddy, an old witch-woman from his childhood Florida-neighborhood home.Here is where the Gaiman myth-factor comes in and the story takes a dark, sinister turn as Spider is punished for playing in the lives of mortals. Only, it's not just Spider that's in danger. Messing with the gods has unforeseen effects for Fat Charlie as well who hasn't been painstakingly careful with his verbal trade. In his mistake, the Bird Woman begins hunting both Fat Charlie and Spider. It's a battle of gods where, once again (since it's Gaiman we're talking about here) humans have the unfortunate consequence of being involved. But when have mortals ever been benignly involved in the torrential affairs of the gods? Like warring nobility or aristocracy, the plebs suffer the duration of a negligent ruling class.Anansi Boys is a story of duality. It's Spider vs. Fat Charlie and Tiger vs. Anansi in a battle over the domination of the novel itself--whose story will win? Spider or Fat Charlie? Tiger or Anansi?I also love the father-son relationship in this one than compared to American Gods. Probably because Gaiman took it further and allowed it to walk off into the sunset. But still a good read.
—Erika
I laughed out loud. While reading. In a Japanese rice bowl joint. Okay, so maybe it was more of a chortle, but it was definitely out loud. And more than just the once. Patrons quietly minding their own business while slogging through their Number Three Specials With Extra Tokyo Beef would be startled into wakefulness to see me - chopsticks in one hand, book in the other - as my grizzled maw broke forth with guffaws and irrepressible smiles.Really, Anansi Boys may be the first thing I've read from Neil Gaiman that I liked. I never got into Sandman (though I'm told I should have persevered). I never finished American Gods (though I'm told I should have persevered). I never finished 1602 (despite guessing that I should have persevered).Still, not only did I like it but I loved it. Enough that I gave my copy to someone else to read and purchased a second copy for another friend. And I'm certain they'll want to do similar things with the book.Anansi Boys is at all times funny, adventurous, and charming. And several other over-used adjectives. In fact, Anansi Boys may be the prototype from which overused adjectives should have come - before they were overused. I'm not sure that Anansi Boys is great literature and I'm not sure that it isn't. What I am certain of beyond any shadow of doubtfulness is that Anansi Boys may be the most fun I have ever had reading a novel.There may be others that I enjoyed more but my experience of this book was such that it pushed (if even momentarily) all other books from my mind. Someone on the back suggests that the book will make you love and be grateful for spiders. Critics and the things they say, huh? Well, I don't love spiders, but dang was this book good.The end.p.s. Anyone thinking of reading Blue like Jazz or Against Christianity or something by Karl Barth should definitely read this first. 'Cuz I mean what if you died after finishing the next book on your queue? It would be an all time tragedy to have wasted hours reading Donald Miller when there is something like Anansi Boys out there. Plus, it's just as spiritual.
—Seth Hahne
One of the few Gaiman books that I only gush mildly about, as opposed to gushing enthusiastically. It's a solid book, and it does all the things that makes Gaiman's books great. It's got humor, myth, gravitas, cleverness.... But it simply didn't impress me as much as Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, or Coriline. I'm willing to admit that the only reason I don't rank this book as 5 stars is because I'm comparing it to his other books, which are profound and perfect. That's probably unfair of me, but I never claimed to be completely fair.
—Patrick
