Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

CBR15 Bingo: Europe (triple Bingo)

Folk med ångest (Anxious People) by Fredrik Backman

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#CBR15 Passport Challenge: Books from different countries (set in and written by a Swedish author, read in Swedish) CBR15 Bingo: Europe (see description for Passport Challenge) Official book description (translated by me): Folk med ångest (literally translated as People with anxiety, official English title Anxious People) is an unusually messy comedy about a hostage drama during an apartment showing, where a failed bank robber locks themselves in with an overly enthusiastic realtor, two bitter IKEA-addicts, a mean multimillionaire, a sad lady, a very pregnant woman, […]

January 2023 Leftovers

Two Kinds of Truth by Michael Connelly

Queen of Thieves by Beezy Marsh

Anxious People by Frederick Backman

The Dead Season by Tessa Wegert

A Diet of Treacle by Lawrence Block

The Club: How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports by Joshua Robinson & Jonathan Clegg

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Here are brief reviews for the books I read in 2023 that I either didn’t have time to review or that didn’t merit 250 words… Two Kinds of Truth*** First new read of 2023! I continue to plow through the Bosch series. I enjoyed most of what I read recently but this was just blah. Boring, predictable dueling plots, though one is resolved with an interesting twist. Read better, read worse in this series. Looking forward to getting to some of the Renee Ballard books. […]

We’re all idiots

Anxious People: A Novel by Fredrik Backman

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I think this might be the perfect novel to start the year, and it is certainly an excellent choice for the times we live in. For the CBR13 gift exchange, I listed Fredrik Backman as an author I would like to read, and Emmalita was kind enough to gift Anxious People to me. This novel is delightful. It’s frequently hilarious, with a truly daft kind of humor, but it also displays tremendous heart and kindness to the point of tears for me. The story does […]

Anxious People: Not what I expected, but charming

Anxious People by Frederik Backman

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This was our June Book Club pick. This is an unexpected and delightful novel. I saw all of the press and buzz about A Man Called Ove and was never really tempted to read it. But this delightfully quirky and human story has made me curious about Backman’s other works.  This is a novel about a bank robbery. And an apartment. And a hostage situation. And the conflict between City and country Swedeners. And love. And marriage. And winning. And losing. And dying . And […]

“Boats that stay in the harbor are safe, sweetheart, but that’s not what boats were built for.”

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

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Fredrik Backman is easily one of my favorite authors. He consistently writes beautiful, gut twisting novels filled with believable characters who are often painted as fairly average, ordinary people thrust into somewhat extraordinary scenarios. If you haven’t read Beartown and Us Against You you’re really missing out on poetically breaking your heart into itty bitty little pieces. “This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, […]

I laughed, I cried, I will re-read.

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

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“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.” This is my favorite of Backman’s books (that I’ve read) by quite a large margin. I would […]



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