has anyone read Neil Gaiman's new book

[mystril at yahoo.com]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., heidit at n... wrote:
> It's called American Gods - I finished it on Tuesday night and 
spent 
> way too much time yesterday thinking about it, especially one 
> particular element of it...

I finished it a couple of weeks ago (and met Neil at the NYC 
signing). I have to go back and read it again with a pile of index 
cards, so I can annotate it myself. Sometimes I wish he wrote 
footnotes like Terry Pratchett. Of course, that would double the 
length of his books and ruin all the fun of looking things up 
myself.  

> w
> e
> d
> n
> e
> s
> d
> a
> y
> w
> e
> e
> k
- 
> I even caught a mention of a Grim in one of the chapters (although 
> whether he was deliberately being referential to his own physical 
> similarity to Sirius Black (did you see that back cover pic?) or to 
> the mythological Grim that haunts churchyards in the UK is unclear).

My bet would be that he isn't referring to himself, but to the 
mythological Grim. 

But then, he is in Stardust -- Charles Vess painted him into the 
lower-left-hand corner of the market scene. So it's perfectly 
possible that he's nodding and winking at NG-JKR fans. I wonder how 
many of us there are. 

> I think he also put Delirium in the San Francisco scene, 
accompanied 
> by her faithful puppy. Who else has pink & green hair and doesn't 
> know what a dollar is.
> 

A rebellious young wizard, perhaps. Or maybe Neville after an 
accident in Charms. 

I loved seeing Del wandering around in AG.
 
> 
> But this isn't enough! I want to know what I missed - has anyone 
else 
> caught references to other books, movies, stories, that might not 
be 
> obvious? I loved catching these little things...and I want more! 
> In fact, I want an annotated edition of the book!

The absolute best place for finding the in jokes is Neil Gaiman's own 
web site (www.neilgaiman.com). He has a list of links to various Web 
sites that he used and a message board for his readers to report back 
and/or post questions. And besides all of that there are lots of 
pictures of Neil looking all SiriusBlack-ish.

Off the top of my head, I can't remember any annotations, except for 
that fact that there was a Death sighting and Hinzelman (?) is a 
Germanic house elf. Hopefully the HP house elves aren't quite so 
bloodthirsty. 

And Mike Ainsel came from the folk tale -- My Ainsel, which I didn't 
realize until I was reading it out loud in a car. 

And Technology Boy was a reference to _Johnny Mnemonic_, one of his 
quotes was almost straight out of the book. 

-mystril has way too many books for her bookshelves