Neil Gaiman is a storyteller. Not all writers are, but he is. He writes a particular type of magic, trickster magic, straight out from carnivals and shadows. Though he works in fantasy, he understands that magic! well magic is flashes and bangs and fireworks but the story is told in emotions and the relationships between two characters. His stories are more than just tales, they are truths about what it means to be human.

So yes, I deeply enjoyed American Gods. It was delightful.

I’m sleepy but my cat did fine at the vet, I reread Ella Enchanted while we waited and gosh it is just the best book. It’s like dinner rolls buttered lightly and fresh from the oven. The story is so familiar to me from having read it hundreds of times but it’s always delicious, comforting, and simple. There’s no challenge or riddles but I think it’s like an old friend.

I’m not so good with people so I don’t have a lot of truly old friends but lately I can feel it again. The way jokes are easy and gestures are familiar but there’s still surprises and new stories, new meanings. It’s on the tip of my tongue the way a loaf melts in your mouth, people laugh without fear and the story repeats again and again without ever growing stale or sad.

This book is a little home, a tiny glowing cottage in the wood on a snowy night that beckons whispering, welcoming, “Step inside, eat at my table, and share my hearth! Though once we were strangers we are now the dearest old friends; come, won’t you stay awhile?”

I’m at roughly the halfway point of A Song of Ice and Fire (middle of the third book) so here goes my spoiler-free five minute review:

A Song of Ice and Fire is the good stuff. It is what you hope for every time you pick up a new author, look twice at an intriguing cover, skim a cover flap with hopes that the book is as good as the summary. It is not over hyped, its praises are fairly sung. Epic fantasy is word diluted, but this series delivers as promised. Readers enter a saga meticulous in detail, yet played out a grand scale.

The details make the books and as George R.R. Martin jumps between characters, the story remains consistant and well woven, true to the small as it is to the large. He expertly plays the reader’s loyalties against themselves, leaving a taste of bitter defeat for every victory, a peek into the true world of conflicted allegiance.

I say the true world, not the real world. The real world is for the factual. The true world is where our great myths live, where our songs, villains, and heros mix together in rainbow puddles, living off the real world like gasoline shimmering on water. Here the fuel drips across the page, the books full of fire and sword, songs of ice and of fire.

George R.R. Martin speaks with a deep voice, born up from the chest. He orates alone in a great drafty hall that, unbeknownst to him, is crowded with spooks. His lecture echoes and rings, reverberates off corner stones, and is born back in whispers by a ghostly host of hundreds.