In this Unabridged Book Club episode, Jen, Sara, and Ashley discuss Fredrik Backman's Anxious People. We also share our pairings including Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Malibu Rising (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm), Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney’s Good Company (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm). We are all big fans of Backman's work and enjoyed discussing this one!
Bookish Check-in
Ashley - Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Jen - Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Sara - Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Main Discussion - Our Book Club Pick
Fredrik Backman's Anxious People (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Our Pairings
Ashley - Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Malibu Rising (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Jen - Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Sara - Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney’s Good Company (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Mentioned in Episode
Give Me One - Non-bookish Goal
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Bookish Check-in
Ashley was reading . . .
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
"A funny, uplifting novel about a boy's journey through New York in the aftermath of September 11th from one of today's most celebrated writers.
"Nine-year-old Oskar Schell embarks on an urgent, secret mission that will take him through the five boroughs of New York. His goal is to find the lock that matches a mysterious key that belonged to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. This seemingly impossible task will bring Oskar into contact with survivors of all sorts of an exhilarating, affecting, often hilarious, and ultimately healing journey. With humor, tenderness, and awe, Jonathan Safran Foer confronts the traumas of our country's difficult history."
Jen was reading . . .
Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
"A dazzling novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris
"In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.
"Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster."
Sara was reading . . .
Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
"I've been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.
"Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life's challenges--how to get relative with the inevitable--you can enjoy a state of success I call 'catching greenlights.'
"So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops.
"Hopefully, it's medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot's license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.
"It's a love letter. To life.
"It's also a guide to catching more greenlights--and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.
"Good luck."
Main Discussion - Our Book Club Pick
Fredrik Backman's Anxious People (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
"Looking at real estate isn't usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can't fix their own marriage. There's a wealthy bank director who has been too busy to care about anyone else and a young couple who are about to have their first child but can't seem to agree on anything, from where they want to live to how they met in the first place. Add to the mix an eighty-seven-year-old woman who has lived long enough not to be afraid of someone waving a gun in her face, a flustered but still-ready-to-make-a-deal real estate agent, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment's only bathroom, and you've got the worst group of hostages in the world.
"Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them--the bank robber included--desperately crave some sort of rescue. As the authorities and the media surround the premises these reluctant allies will reveal surprising truths about themselves and set in motion a chain of events so unexpected that even they can hardly explain what happens next.
"Rich with Fredrik Backman's 'pitch-perfect dialogue and an unparalleled understanding of human nature' (Shelf Awareness), Anxious People is an ingeniously constructed story about the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness, and hope--the things that save us, even in the most anxious times."
Our Pairings
Ashley recommended
Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Malibu Rising (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
"Four famous siblings throw an epic party to celebrate the end of the summer. But over the course of twenty-four hours, the family drama that ensues will change their lives forever.
"Malibu: August 1983. It's the day of Nina Riva's annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas: Nina, the talented surfer and supermodel; brothers Jay and Hud, one a championship surfer, the other a renowned photographer; and their adored baby sister, Kit. Together the siblings are a source of fascination in Malibu and the world over--especially as the offspring of the legendary singer Mick Riva.
"The only person not looking forward to the party of the year is Nina herself, who never wanted to be the center of attention, and who has also just been very publicly abandoned by her pro tennis player husband. Oh, and maybe Hud--because it is long past time for him to confess something to the brother from whom he's been inseparable since birth.
"Jay, on the other hand, is counting the minutes until nightfall, when the girl he can't stop thinking about promised she'll be there.
"And Kit has a couple secrets of her own--including a guest she invited without consulting anyone.
"By midnight the party will be completely out of control. By morning, the Riva mansion will have gone up in flames. But before that first spark in the early hours before dawn, the alcohol will flow, the music will play, and the loves and secrets that shaped this family's generations will all come rising to the surface.
"Malibu Rising is a story about one unforgettable night in the life of a family: the night they each have to choose what they will keep from the people who made them . . . and what they will leave behind."
Jen recommended
Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
"In an elegant hôtel particulier in Paris, Renée, the concierge, is all but invisible--short, plump, middle-aged, with bunions on her feet and an addiction to television soaps. Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo. In short, she's everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois building in an upscale neighborhood. But Renée has a secret: she furtively, ferociously devours art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With biting humor, she scrutinizes the lives of the tenants--her inferiors in every way except that of material wealth.
"Paloma is a twelve-year-old who lives on the fifth floor. Talented and precocious, she's come to terms with life's seeming futility and decided to end her own on her thirteenth birthday. Until then, she will continue hiding her extraordinary intelligence behind a mask of mediocrity, acting the part of an average pre-teen high on pop culture, a good but not outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.
"Paloma and Renée hide their true talents and finest qualities from a world they believe cannot or will not appreciate them. But after a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building, they will begin to recognize each other as kindred souls, in a novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us, and 'teaches philosophical lessons by shrewdly exposing rich secret lives hidden beneath conventional exteriors' (Kirkus Reviews)."
Sara recommended
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney’s Good Company (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
"Flora Mancini has been happily married for more than twenty years. But everything she thought she knew about herself, her marriage, and her relationship with her best friend, Margot, is upended when she stumbles upon an envelope containing her husband's wedding ring--the one he claimed he lost one summer when their daughter, Ruby, was five.
"Flora and Julian struggled for years, scraping together just enough acting work to raise Ruby in Manhattan and keep Julian's small theater company--Good Company--afloat. A move to Los Angeles brought their first real career successes, a chance to breathe easier, and a reunion with Margot, now a bona fide television star. But has their new life been built on lies? What happened that summer all those years ago? And what happens now?
"With Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's signature tenderness, humor, and insight, Good Company tells a bighearted story of the lifelong relationships that both wound and heal us."
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