Anansi Boys



For week 8, I read Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. This book was so much fun! I had a much easier time getting through this one than last week's "The Magicians". I found something to chuckle at almost every other page and the way that Gaiman weaves the stories of Anansi the African trickster God into his novel is very interesting. According to the book, all stories belong to Anansi. That was one way that Gaiman seems to kind of reinvent myths and make it relevant to the contemporary world. Gaiman even gives some of the evolution of the tales, explanations of how some people sometimes think that Anansi is a rabbit, how Anansi’s tales became African American Br’er Rabbit tales. I really enjoyed the book and learned a little about mythology in the process. I do wonder though if someone who is actually from the Caribbean or from the African diaspora  would enjoy the novel as much as I did, having no knowledge of Anansi beforehand. Neil Gaiman is from England if I'm not mistaken so I'm not sure how accurately he depicted the characters and their cultures but it seemed very accurate from my understanding.  Overall, the book was very humorous and gave me an interest in African myths. I'd like to read more books similar to this one. I think I may pick up "American Gods" next.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Akata Witch

For this week I read Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor. This novel has been my favorite read so far in this course.  Part of it had to do with my fascination of the country of Nigeria and my curiosity about albinism but the story was very interesting and kept me engaged the whole time. The society of the Leopard People and the school of Hogwarts in Harry Potter have many similarities and it's definitely something that you pick up on while reading. It was very fun to learn about the Leopard People though because there was this introduction not only to magic and mystery but to Nigerian culture as well. I loved the excerpts from Fast Facts for Free Agents, it made me feel like I was learning along with Sunny. I related a lot to Sunny, especially the dynamic she seemed to have with her father. Her father obviously didn't hate her as Sunny assumed but he was much harder on her than her siblings. I wish that the author could have explored their relationship a little but more in the story
Read more

Fragments of a Hologram Rose

For week 11 I read Fragments of a Hologram Rose by William Gibson. In this reality, it is clearly the future and technology is much more advanced. There seems to be a power outage probably due to overuse of electronics and other technology. I have to be honest I didn't quite grasp the point of this story. My first reaction was that I didn't like it but it's really that I didn't understand a lot of the vocabulary being used. Even upon reading it a second time, I'm still not sure of how to make sense of it. ASP stands for Apparent Sensory Perception, so I guess that this holograph technology is similar to virtual reality. I thought it was interesting when it said, " Roughly a quarter of all ASP users are unable to comfortably assimilate the subjective body picture of the opposite sex. Over the years some broadcast ASP stars have become increasingly androgynous in an attempt to capture this segment of the audience." I wonder why this would be a problem. Esp
Read more

The Future

In the future, The film/movie theater industry will have found a way to stay afloat and not become a forgotten past time. I think that movie theaters will become an interactive experience where you truly feel like you're in the movie yourself. It will be a combination of virtual reality, special effects, and technology that will cause the seats to move and vibrate. There will probably be thousands of options for streaming services and cable television will be obsolete. The environment will most likely be continuously getting worse unless by some miracle we get someone in office who actually cares to change policies when it comes to being more environmentally friendly. Although our planet is suffering I think that things won't get really bad until well after I'm dead and gone. Technology-wise I think that we will see enormous progress in the next twenty years it's hard to speak where we'll go because it almost feels as if anything is possible in that field. Overall,
Read more