Broadside No. 11 – Neil Gaiman

Ahoy there me mateys!  Welcome to the eleventh broadside – the Neil Gaiman edition.  Most of me crew has likely heard of him but on the off chance ye haven’t well then take a look.  Now Mr. Gaiman is a pretty prolific author and apparently was named by the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers.  He writes comics, novels, films, articles, children’s books, and a whole lot more.  This being me book blog, I am going to focus on his novels.  I have read 7 of them as well as some of the collected short story collections.  While I haven’t loved everything by him, I always enjoy his style.

Please note: All book descriptions are taken directly from the author’s website and the book title links lead to Goodreads.

neverwhere

I admit that for a long time I had never heard of Mr. Gaiman.  Then one day I spotted this.  It sounded odd and interesting.  I began reading it and was transported into the underworld of London.  It is gritty and dark and suspenseful.  But what stood out was the writing.  It didn’t feel like anything I had read before (at that time anyway) and I was hooked.  I devoured this one and wanted more.  The book blurb:

Richard Mayhew is an unassuming young businessman living in London, with a dull job and a pretty but demanding fiancee. Then one night he stumbles across a girl bleeding on the sidewalk. He stops to help her–and the life he knows vanishes like smoke.

Several hours later, the girl is gone too. And by the following morning Richard Mayhew has been erased from his world. His bank cards no longer work, taxi drivers won’t stop for him, his landlord rents his apartment out to strangers. He has become invisible, and inexplicably consigned to a London of shadows and darkness a city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals and abandoned subway stations. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has landed somewhere different, somewhere that is Neverwhere.

For this is the home of Door, the mysterious girl whom Richard rescued in the London Above. A personage of great power and nobility in this murky, candlelit realm, she is on a mission to discover the cause of her family’s slaughter, and in doing so preserve this strange underworld kingdom from the malevolence that means to destroy it. And with nowhere else to turn, Richard Mayhew must now join the Lady Door’s entourage in their determined–and possibly fatal–quest . . .

So the next book I read

american gods

Okay so while I adored this book, I have to admit I do not really know how to describe it.  It is long and dense and fascinating with mixes of myth, religion, reality, and lots inbetween.  The road trip in this novel was awesome and I looked up a lot of the places as I was reading.  The book blurb:

Released from prison, Shadow finds his world turned upside down. His wife has been killed; a mysterious stranger offers him a job. But Mr. Wednesday, who knows more about Shadow than is possible, warns that a storm is coming — a battle for the very soul of America . . . and they are in its direct path.

One of the most talked-about books of the new millennium, American Gods is a kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth and across an American landscape at once eerily familiar and utterly alien. It is, quite simply, a contemporary masterpiece.

• Hugo Award for Best SF/Fantasy Novel
• Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel
• Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel
• Nebula Award for Best Novel

the graveyard book

A toddler loses his family and wanders into a graveyard.  The ghosts and other inhabitants agree to raise him.  Nobody Owens, known as Bod, cannot leave the graveyard for his own safety.  But can he truly live there forever?  I adored this one.  The blurb:

Bod is an unusual boy who inhabits an unusual place-he’s the only living resident of a graveyard. Raised from infancy by the ghosts, werewolves, and other cemetery denizens, Bod has learned the antiquated customs of his guardians’ time as well as their timely ghostly teachings-like the ability to Fade. Can a boy raised by ghosts face the wonders and terrors of the worlds of both the living and the dead? And then there are things like ghouls that aren’t really one thing or the other.

And then of course you have this:

coraline

This book scared grown adults.  A little girl named Coraline, goes through a door to a world that seems like her own only better.  But is it?  It didn’t scare me but I loved the story and the illustrations.  And of course it has an awesome cat as a sidekick.  I also hear the movie is good.  The book blurb:

When Coraline steps through a door to find another house strangely similar to her own (only better), things seem marvelous.

But there’s another mother there, and another father, and they want her to stay and be their little girl. They want to change her and never let her go.

Coraline will have to fight with all her wits and courage if she is to save herself and return to her ordinary life.

• Publishers Weekly Best Book (WINNER)
• Book Sense 76 Pick (WINNER)
• Child Magazine Best Book of the Year (WINNER)
• New York Public Library’s “One Hundred Titles for Reading and Sharing” (WINNER)
• Amazon.com Editors’ Choice (WINNER)
• ALA Notable Children’s Book (WINNER)
• ALA Best Book for Young Adults (WINNER)
• New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age (WINNER)
• IRA/CBC Children’s Choice (WINNER)
• Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children’s Book Award Masterlist (Vermont) (WINNER)
• Bram Stoker Award for Best Work for Young Readers (WINNER)
• Hugo Award for Best Novella (WINNER)
• School Library Journal Best Book (WINNER)

Sheesh lots of awards huh?  So that be me introduction to Neil Gaiman .  If ye haven’t read any of his novels I would suggest ye hoist those sails and get moving!

To visit her website go to:

Neil Gaiman – Author

To see a complete list of all books he has written visit:

Neil Gaiman – Books

To add this author or his novels to Goodreads go to:

Yer Ports for Plunder List

If ye want to see me other author broadsides:

Garth Nix – No. 1

Sharon Shinn – No. 2

John Scalzi – No. 3

Tamora Pierce – No. 4

Brandon Sanderson – No. 5

Robin McKinley – No. 6

Michael Crichton – No. 7

Mercedes Lackey – No. 8

Dean Kootnz – No. 9

Justine Larbalestier – No. 10