You can add THE NEIL GAIMAN READER to your Want to Read shelf here: Ģ. For me The Neil Gaiman Reader is a giant way of telling people to accept that, or at least asking people to accept that. I think that as an author I’m a bit of an otter in that I will probably do something else next time, which if you’re looking for exactly the same thing you liked last time, is going to lead you to madness and frustration.

But otters, if you give them a fish, they’ll do something completely different because they already did that, and they’ll do something else for their fish, which makes otters very difficult to train. You can train a dolphin if you just give them a fish they’ll do the trick again, the same thing that gave them the fish.

Some authors are otters an otter won’t do tricks, you can’t train otters properly. Some authors are dolphins they will bounce that ball on their nose while shooting across the pool on their tail at thirty miles an hour and they will do it every time and you will clap, and you will cheer. There are things that they did when I trusted and followed them that I didn’t like at the time, but now I look back and think those are some of the coolest things they ever made. There are a few song writers out there, and performers―Elvis Costello for me is one Bob Dylan, I think, is slowly becoming one in my old age―about whom you think, “I’m just going to follow you and see what you do next.” David Bowie, actually, was one as well. You might think that if you liked American Gods, you’ll like everything else I’ve written and you probably won’t, but what you will get with The Neil Gaiman Reader is a sense of who I am as a writer and a sense of the territory that that covers―and with luck, the realization that there’s stuff that you like and stuff that you don’t like, but I’m going to keep doing both. I’d love people to keep an eye out for The Neil Gaiman Reader.

American gods annotated