Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

…culture is as much about what we encourage as what we actually permit.

Beartown by Fredrik Backman

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This book needs to be required reading for older middle school, or first year high schoolers. I can’t think of a more instructive book about the intoxicating nature of power and popularity and the primal pull of self preservation. If you add any tool to a child’s life skills toolbox, let it be empathy. With empathy comes strength, resilience and just being a decent freaking human being. We could use more of that in the world. The subject matter here is something that could easily […]

Anxiety aside, read this book (spoilers!)

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

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Beartown, also by Fredrik Backman, was a rough read for me so I found myself stalling on Anxious People. I had peeked at the jacket summary but wasn’t convinced it wouldn’t wreak the same kind of emotional havoc. Reader, I was so so wrong and this is a strong contender for book of the year. This review is going to lean hard into spoilers because I’m not sure how to process it without them but I’ll frontload with a non-spoilery summary. The book tells two stories […]

Bridges exist to bring people closer together…

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

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This was just the sort of thing I should have picked up at the beginning of the pandemic when I was having trouble settling my mind enough to read. On the surface, a book about a handful of people being held hostage in an apartment in Sweden by an incompetent bank robber seems like the wrong book to read now. It’s like the nightmare that I occasionally have: finding myself unmasked and trapped in close proximity to unmasked strangers whose risky behaviors during the pandemic […]

a very special episode in a very farcical town

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

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*”Yakkety Sax” blares through your speakers* A robbery- wait, but not quite. A bank robber, but not who you expect. An accidental hostage situation. Aggressively unhelpful witnesses. A nervous eater who devours a whole lime, pith and all. Bumbling cops. Feisty old ladies. Sounds fun, yes? It is fun! There is a solid farce at the core of this story. Misunderstandings, misdirection, and missed connections fly in and out of quickly slamming doors. A manically wound player piano would not be out of place in […]

“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, […]

Must love Idiots and Bridges

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

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I read (actually listened) to this book directly after reading the review of another CBR reviewer (thanks, Narfna!), and finished it in 2 days.  I rarely tear through books these days due to meddling kids always being underfoot and a demanding work schedule, but this novel was the exception.  It made me want to fold an extra load of laundry, volunteer to do the dishes, and myriad other household chores so I could be left alone to linger in the world Backman created. I won’t […]



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