From the Bookshelf of Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge…

Anxious People

Fredrik Backman,

Neil Smith (Translator)

Start date: October 1, 2021

Finish date: October 31, 2021

Discussion: 2021 Monthly Group Reads

Why we're reading this: October 2021 monthly group read for "locked room mystery"…more
[close] October 2021 monthly group read for "locked room mystery"

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2021 Monthly Group Reads

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* 2021 Monthly Group Reads - the Final List of Categories and Books
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What Members Thought

Dec 02, 2020 Angie rated it it was amazing

I loved this book! Usually on road trips I'm easily distracted and can only read a bit before I find myself checking my phone or playing games or something, but I was hooked from the dedication page on! Literally! The book is dedicated to "the voices in my head, the most remarkable of my friends. And to my wife, who lives with us." Substitute husband for wife and I was feeling that dedication in a very real way! Since I was reading in the car without pen and paper to jot down favorite passages, I loved this book! Usually on road trips I'm easily distracted and can only read a bit before I find myself checking my phone or playing games or something, but I was hooked from the dedication page on! Literally! The book is dedicated to "the voices in my head, the most remarkable of my friends. And to my wife, who lives with us." Substitute husband for wife and I was feeling that dedication in a very real way! Since I was reading in the car without pen and paper to jot down favorite passages, I ended up snapping pictures of pages with some of my favorite writing. I took SIXTEEN pictures! I felt like every time I turned the page in the first 25 pages or so there was something screaming "THIS AUTHOR UNDERSTANDS YOU!" Gems like this:

"There's such an unbelievable amount that we're all supposed to be able to cope with these days. You're supposed to have a job, and somewhere to live, and a family, and you're supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi. Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks... We're not in control. So we learn to pretend, all the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else. We pretend we're normal..."

and:

"We don't have time to think or breathe, we just wake up and start digging through the heap, because there will be another one dumped on us tomorrow. We look around occasionally, at our place of work or at parents' meeting or out in the street, and realize with horror that everyone else seems to know exactly what they're doing. We're the only ones who have to pretend. Everyone else can afford stuff and has a handle on other stuff and enough energy to deal with even more stuff. And everyone else's children can swim.
But we weren't ready to become adults. Someone should have stopped us."

And I wanted to rush straight to my Moms with ADHD online group and share all the bits of amazingness I was finding. Like this:

"Ten years ago a man was standing on a bridge. This story isn't about that man, so you don't really need to think about him right now. Well, obviously you can't help thinking about him, it's like saying "Don't think about cookies," and now you're thinking about cookies.
Don't think about cookies!" :)

And those were just the life-wise words scattered generously throughout the book!! Then there was the story! And the storytelling! And the characters! And the relationships! And the mystery! At one point, over halfway through the book, I literally gasped "Wait, what?!" and had to go all the way back to the beginning to try and find clues as to how I didn't understand one really important part of the mystery. The writing was brilliant - I don't know how Backman pulled off that part but it was brilliant. (No spoilers!)

It was just all so very, very good!! I haven't gotten this excited about a book in a while. I loved it. This was a library copy, but I'll be buying a personal copy to keep on my very exclusive "Keepers" shelf here at home. ...more

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Aug 24, 2020 Eva rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

One single really bad idea can ruin a person’s life. So when a bank robber tries to rob a cashless bank and then escapes into an apartment that is having an open house, what can go wrong? That is how Anxious People opens and right from the start Backman has the reader smiling along as he settles the reader into the heart of the story.

A roomful of people who didn’t know each other before this event will be forever changed by it. The author has written a fun cast of characters including a couple ...more

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Jan 26, 2021 Lindsey Stinson rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, bookclub

At first it was hard for me to get into this book. I think the rhythm of it was just something I wasn't used to. However, as I followed the threads from chapter to chapter, I became completely engrossed in these characters and the mystery. By the end, I completely loved the book. ...more

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