Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.”

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

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Cannonball Read Bingo Square: Cold I”m late to the game on this 2012 book about Ove, who I would dub the King of all Curmudgeons. Picking this book for the “cold” bingo square was a no-brainer because his character first presents as the chilliest of all cold characters, with rarely a kind word to say about anyone. I personally would crown Ove as the King of all Curmudgeons. But of course, he would bristle at the honorific, belittling the idea that a) someone would pay […]

Delightful stubbornness

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

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A Man Called Ove is about a delightfully stubborn widower in Sweden. He has a strict logic that he applies to the world. He yearns for consistency and routine. Anyone who deviates from the order is likely inefficient and an idiot in his mind. He is suspicious of most things and prefers to abstain from all social things. I enjoyed his rising frustration at the computer store when he attempts to buy a computer. Despite his crankiness, Ove fell in love with a woman named […]

Airport fiction, a great read, and a new favorite.

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69. Die Trying by Lee Child (3 stars) I’m not entirely sure why I keep returning to these kinds of books. I don’t know what “kind” of book it is, other than “airport fiction”. You know the kind; the mass market vaguely defined fiction that goes down easy without leaving much of an aftertaste. Easily digested and forgettable, these books cover the literary landscape without leaving any kind of quantifiable mark. They exist to sell books, and they sell books because they exist. I don’t […]

A Man Called Ove is a Curmudgeon, but One with a Heart

A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman, Henning Koch (translator), George Newbern (narrator)

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I did a thing I don’t normally do, I watched the movie first. I had gotten A Man Called Ove on Audible some time ago, but kept holding off on it. I tend to pick the audiobook I want to listen to based on its length – how much time do I have to give it right now? Sitting at just over 9 hours you’d think I would have found a few days to listen before now, but I had not. With August quickly getting […]

Just some nice books.

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I Feel Bad about My Neck The charm of this book lies in the fact that the audiobook was read by Nora Ephron. I listened to the whole thing on a walk. This is a short collection of essays about aging in various kinds of ways, whether that means the effects on aging on your body or the simply just the passing of time. So those two themes, along with a few others, sort of permeate this whole collection. The essays include the frustration of […]

I warned them that I don’t like to cry…

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 I read this book for a book club that I’m a part of.  When we voted on our July selection, I deliberately did not cast mine for this book.  Because I just KNEW.  I could tell from the description that it was one of those books that was going to make me cry.  Apparently this is something that lots of people enjoy however, and I was outvoted. The titular character is a middle-aged Swedish man named Ove, who has lost his wife and his job […]



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