American Gods – Neil Gaiman. Another borrowed book, this time from Jon. I’ve been a fan of Gaiman’s work on Sandman for a long time and so had been looking forward to this novel. His novel with Terry Pratchett (Good Omens) was a great cross over, with their individual styles complementing each other extremely well. Gaiman’s new book extends his particular theological approach from Sandman, although it is in no way directly affiliated to that series – the similarities are hard to miss though. The story is of a jailed criminal, Shadow, who gets out of jail to find himself taking up a job with a shady character called Wednesday who claims to be the god Odin. What follows is a journey round the dark under-psyche of America stopping off to visit various gods of the old world who arrived in the new country in the minds of immigrants. It’s all very readable and you learn a lot about various old gods but, at the end of the book, I felt a bit cheated. There was no real meat to get your teeth into and a lot of the ideas are re-hashed, albeit well, from his earlier works. Finished it in a few hours – good holiday read.