Hey so this here book is good!
I read it after having seen the miniseries version of Good Omens over the summer, and I spent the first two episodes attempting and failing to figure out if I had actually read the book back when I was a kid and it was on my brothers' bookshelves, or if it was like the Lord of the Rings: one I had seen so often it felt like I must have read it, but in fact never had. I did determine eventually that I hadn't read it; while a lot of the miniseries felt familiar to me, it was in that cultural osmosis sort of way, and not in the 'oh I read this a long long time ago' way.
It was also familiar in a 'oh, this is like a Douglas Adams book written by a couple of other people' way. There is a sensibility and wackiness in it that is just quintessentially a certain kind of British, where as an American you read about a thing and you can't quite tell if it's a gag in a book or if it's just something that reads that way and is actually thought of as entirely normal in the UK. But anyway! The book reads like the miniseries feels, which makes sense, given Gaiman's involvement in the miniseries. There are a couple of aspects of the book that did not age well at all, and which feel remarkably out of place, since on the whole the book holds up pretty well. But that didn't impact my enjoyment of reading it. Honestly, my main feeling when reading it was thinking over and over again what a successful adaptation it made. But the book itself is still worth reading, even so.
Grade: A
I read it after having seen the miniseries version of Good Omens over the summer, and I spent the first two episodes attempting and failing to figure out if I had actually read the book back when I was a kid and it was on my brothers' bookshelves, or if it was like the Lord of the Rings: one I had seen so often it felt like I must have read it, but in fact never had. I did determine eventually that I hadn't read it; while a lot of the miniseries felt familiar to me, it was in that cultural osmosis sort of way, and not in the 'oh I read this a long long time ago' way.
It was also familiar in a 'oh, this is like a Douglas Adams book written by a couple of other people' way. There is a sensibility and wackiness in it that is just quintessentially a certain kind of British, where as an American you read about a thing and you can't quite tell if it's a gag in a book or if it's just something that reads that way and is actually thought of as entirely normal in the UK. But anyway! The book reads like the miniseries feels, which makes sense, given Gaiman's involvement in the miniseries. There are a couple of aspects of the book that did not age well at all, and which feel remarkably out of place, since on the whole the book holds up pretty well. But that didn't impact my enjoyment of reading it. Honestly, my main feeling when reading it was thinking over and over again what a successful adaptation it made. But the book itself is still worth reading, even so.
Grade: A
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