Global online book club begins reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods today
In the spirit of the “One book, one city” initiative in which cities organize to read the same book at the same time, Crowdsourcing author Jeff Howe has launched a campaign to get the entire ‘twitterverse’ to read the same book at once. Readers were asked to vote on the book, and contenders such as Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut were finally beat out by Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, a novel about an ex-convict who makes a bizarre journey across America. Gaiman was “half-pleased and half-not” with the decision, and blogged with some concern about the choice: “Some people love it, some sort of like it, and some people hate it … It’s not a book I’d hand out to everyone, because the people who don’t know anything about what I’ve written and who hate it—who might have loved Stardust, or Neverwhere, or The Graveyard Book, or Sandman—probably won’t go and look any further.” The big read begins today, with followers using the hashtag #1b1t to discuss the book.