What do you think happens when a friend tweets about their apparantly missing copy of Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and how they’d like to read it again? Especially when Neil Gaiman is flavour of the month on Twitter at the moment? Even more especially when her closest Twitter friends are unashamed Gaiman fans, too? 🙂
What happens is that we now have at least half-a-dozen close friends who are going to spend April reading Good Omens, and then May reading American Gods. And there has been at lesat one proposal for The Ocean At The End Of The Lane for June.
But first, come April 1, we will embark on reading Good Omens together: each person will be reading their own copy at their own speed. I’ve not done this before. The idea is that we will be able to share exciting and interesting bits we’re reading as we go along. So keeping more-or-less in step will be an interesting exercise.
I’ve read Good Omens several times myself. I originally came to this novel via the other works of Terry Pratchett. Sir Terry is one of Britain’s most famous novelists. He has now written and published more than forty Discworld novels, but at the time of Good Omens, he had less than dozen written. Looking for more Pratchett fiction, it was natural for me to discover Good Omens.
Until then, I’d heard of Neil Gaiman but only as an author of graphic novels, which for some reason didn’t really interest me. It took many years for me to discover he wrote proper novels, too. American Gods was the first novel by Gaiman that wasn’t Good Omens that I bought and read and that happened only last year.
Good Omens plays on some very Christian mythology about how the world works (or doesn’t), and how it might end. Both Pratchett and Gaiman like this topic. It will be interesting to see the commentary from my friends, since how you view that sort of topic is influenced by your own faith and what you were brought up to believe in. I know my own beliefs have come in for some questioning since I last read it and all of my friends who have put their hand up also have highly differing backgrounds!
Of course, first and foremost, we are all fully intending to enjoy a good story.
Feel free to join in!
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