Good Omens is amazing

I was already a Terry Pratchett fan and a Neil Gaiman fan in 1990, when their comedic novel Good Omens showed up in the bookstore I worked at, and I dibsed it, took it home over the weekend, read it in huge gulps, and wrote an enthusiastic review on a 3x5 card that I tacked to the bookshelf next to it on the new release rack at the front of the store; I hand-sold hundreds of copies, and have read it dozens of times since.

It's really a perfect gem of a novel, combining so much of what makes each of those authors so great: Gaiman's ability of tap into the deep roots of myth and to spin the most wonderful of phrases; Pratchett's incredible heart that can turn sweetness up to 11 without introducing so much as a drop of sentimentality, his Douglas Adams-style gift for surprise jokes that are so well-turned that they elicit surprised barks of laughter when they occur.

I've been very excited and optimistic about the Amazon Prime adaptation of the novel; I knew Gaiman had put everything into it, and had taken instruction from Pratchett prior to his death, and the stupendous and creative marketing that Amazon has thrown at the project (a five-storey escape room in Soho; flocks of chattering Satanic nuns in the streets of Austin for SXSW) made it clear that they were giving the project the kind of gold-plated attention it deserved.

But it still took me a couple weeks to get around to watching it -- video time is really scarce in my schedule, and I'm perennially guilty over the years-long backlog of books on my TBR shelf that I'm hoping to review and/or blurb -- but I managed to remedy that yesterday, watching all six hours of the program (though I could only get through about half of it on the big screen in my living room: Amazon's DRM blocks Google's Chromecast for Android, and Chrome for Ubuntu -- the only GNU/Linux browser that talks to a Chromecast -- crashed repeatedly while trying to play it back, leaving me watching on my phone). Read the rest