The One Book, One Twitter program kicks off tomorrow with Neil Gaiman’s American Gods as the first summer read.
Crowdsourcing author Jeff Howe started the project via his own Twitter feed, and wrote about it for Wired, where he’s a contributing editor. (GalleyCat spoke to Howe about One Book, One Twitter last month.) Twitterers voted on the choices, eventually choosing American Gods over Fahrenheit 451 and One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The Guardian spotted that Gaiman responded to the choice on his blog. He writes: “As an author, I’m half-pleased and half-not, mostly because American Gods is such a divisive sort of book. Some people love it, some sort of like it, and some people hate it. (As contrasted with, say, The Graveyard Book, which some people love, some like, and a statistically insignificant number of people hate.) 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.”
And the instructions from Howe: “Start reading as soon as you want to, but in the spirit of no spoilers, avoid dishing about anything past Chapter 3 for the [next] few weeks.”