'Listen. Fox was here first, and his brother was the wolf. Fox said, people will live for ever. If they die they will not die for long. Wolf said, no, people will die, people must die, all things that live must die, or they will spread and cover the world, and eat all the salmon and the caribou and the buffalo, eat all the squash and all the corn. Now one day Wolf died, and he said to the fox, quick, bring me back to life. And Fox said, No, the dead must stay dead. You convinced me. And he wept as he said this. But he said it, and it was final. Now Wolf rules the world of the dead and Fox lives always under the sun and the moon, and he still mourns his brother.'

- American Gods, Neil Gaiman


The other day at Kinokuniya, we happened to be standing near a book titled How to Win Arguments, or something along those lines, I forget.

The friend I was with, a lawyer, mentioned that she knows someone who only reads books like that.

That is the saddest thing I've ever heard, was my reply. And if you really think about it, such... instructional manuals only present theory. Fiction gives you context, the play-by-play. More importantly, perhaps, it gives you a life.

I finished the tenth anniversary edition of Neil Gaiman's American Gods today. This is his preferred text and it has about 12,000 more words than the first edition, which was cut down from what was a version of this current version. I don't remember the first edition in such detail
that I know what is different about it.

I just feel... awed.

I'd forgotten what it was like to think that, perhaps, Neil Gaiman is God.

(Actually I wasn't even intending to read this, because I thought, I'd already read it once and how different could it be, and because I have been very disillusioned about Gaiman and have not even been following him on Twitter, for the longest of time. But then I saw it at the Jakarta airport bookstore and I was still holding most of my rupiah and was upset about having wasted a few days of my life on such a terribly, terribly organised trip in Indonesia that I just wanted to spend money and so I bought it and started reading it.)

There is no other explanation for the fact that this man pulled The Sandman and American Gods out of his head. They may be about gods but they make you feel so crushingly human.

I guess that's why I suddenly recalled that conversation about that person who reads only books like How to Win an Argument. So sad.