American Gods

April 12, 2013 Leave a comment

113767203What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore it knows it’s not fooling a soul.” ― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

American Gods is a masterful blend of mythology and existential questioning, crafted with the confidence of a storyteller who knows how to make the unreal feel intimately familiar. The novel follows Shadow Moon, a man adrift after personal tragedy, who becomes entangled in a looming war between the old gods brought to America by immigrants and the new gods born of technology, media, and modern obsession.

Gaiman uses this supernatural conflict to explore what a nation chooses to worship, and what those choices reveal about identity, belief, displacement, and memory. His America is vast, strange, melancholic, and quietly magical with a landscape where roadside attractions become sacred spaces and forgotten deities cling to survival.

What makes the novel enduring is its atmosphere: moody, mythic, and laden with symbolism. Shadow’s journey is both epic and introspective, revealing the cost of faith and the fragility of stories in a changing world.

While the pacing occasionally drifts, the richness of character, imagination, and cultural insight more than compensates. American Gods remains one of Gaiman’s most ambitious works, an absorbing, thought-provoking modern myth that lingers long after the final page.

 This dark, poetic and thrilling novel across an American landscape is my “Read of the Week”.

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River of Smoke

April 10, 2013 Leave a comment

150px-River_of_smoke“Opium is like the wind or the tides: it is outside my power to affect its course. A man is neither good nor evil because he sails his ship upon the wind. It is his conduct towards those around him – his friends, his family, his servants – by which he must be judged”

– Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke

River of Smoke, is a novel on trade, empire, and cultural encounter in the age of the Opium Wars. The story is set in Canton in the 1830s, where the novel shifts from the sea-bound drama of Sea of Poppies (first in the Ibis trilogy ) to a more contemplative, cosmopolitan world shaped by commerce and ideas.

Canton, in this story is neither completely Chinese nor European, it’s a place where merchants, sailors, painters, and exiles coexist uneasily. Characters such as the opium trader Bahram Modi and the painter Robin Chinnery are not heroic figures but moral intermediaries, caught between profit and conscience. Through them, Ghosh explores how global capitalism takes root not only through violence, but also through everyday transactions, friendships, and compromises.

The novel is dense, patient, and immersive, demanding attentive reading. Historical detail is worn lightly, yet it is a critique of imperial greed and cultural misunderstanding. Unlike conventional historical fiction, River of Smoke resists dramatic climax, choosing instead to trace the slow, inexorable drift toward catastrophe.

‘River of Smoke’, a brilliant historical fiction set in late 19th century China is my “Read of the week”.

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