I'm having a Frerik Backman week. My Friends is his latest novel. Backman's stories break hearts, offering a front-row seat to the sadness and abuse in the world. Then he brings together damaged opposites who help each other heal. He writes what it feels like to be an anxious person so well that it makes me anxious.
"People say that anxiety is fear for no reason, but Ted's brain is very helpful when it comes to providing suggestions. Once he read a book that said that people with neuropsychiatric disorders need to "make friends with their brain," but Ted and Ted's brain are not friends, they're classmates, forced to do a group assignment called "life" together. And it's not going great."
― My Friends
He has a gift for descriptive metaphors that provoke giggles.
"The birds are like tourists. They screech and make a mess, but you're not allowed to shoot them…"
Backman's stories pierce and penetrate, giving incentive to care more about those you love and those who are unloved.
😭🎨🖌️👨🎤🥹
The Answer is No, by Fredrik Backman, translated by Elizabeth Denoma, is short and sweet. Backman takes the absurd and makes it plausible, such as a woman pretending to be in a coma and hiding from her family at her doctor's apartment. Or a trash pile being declared a hill to keep it from becoming the city's problem. Or a Facebook group that believes in angels showing up to worship a neighbor. For only 60 pages, Backman creates beautiful chaos.
🗑️🍳😇
Infinite Archive is the third book in The Midsolar Murders series by Mur Lafferty. They are a great mash-up of mystery and science fiction. I would like to tour Lafferty's brain because her plots are clever and inventive, bordering on wacky, and the characters she invents, like aliens made of rock and space ships that are the internet, are captivating. Her large cast of characters behaves questionably — a key element to a mystery series, with numerous potential victims and suspects. Infinet Archive has space babies and cats! Win!
🐈😺👽🛸🚀
After reading the emotional rollercoaster that is Frederick Backman, I was ready for something enjoyable and escapist. Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries was perfect. Emily Wilde is a professor at Cambridge in the field of faeries — she is a dyriadologist. She travels to a faraway island in Norway to study the elusive frost faeries, where she is followed by her Cambridge rival, handsome Wendell Brambleby, who leads a charmed life as the head of the department. His students are always eager to do whatever he asks, making research and field work more of a vacation than a chore. Emily is a grumpy, thorough scholar who struggles with the niceties of social interaction. She inadvertently offends the insular inhabitants of Hrafnsvik, Ljosland, forcing her to accept help from Bramblely. There is much to discover and learn, but she can be her biggest impediment.
🌨️🧚♀️🧚♂️🧚♂️❄️
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