Rating: 

Backman does it again! He skillfully develops and divides his eccentric characters between two rival towns. Their shared similarity is their passion for hockey. As the story progresses you build sympathy for each misfit. The overall theme of the book is everything is not as simple as it seems while at the same time, everything can be simple without overcomplicating. Backman never fails to whip up an interesting storyline and throw in a bunch of wild characters and spill some deep truths and emotions common to all humans. Need to go read the first book!

Insights/Thoughts

• “Everyone is a hundred different things but in other people’s eyes we usually get the chance to be only one of them.” I think other people’s opinions of yourself never matter as much as your opinion of yourself at the end of the day. As long as you’re happy with your version of your multiple selves, that should be the only thing that matters.
• “It takes time to learn to love something but much less to kill it: a single moment will do.” As much we would hate to admit it, we’re on a short fuse. We take years, a lifetime to build something that crumbles after a few heated exchanges. Someone we love can die tomorrow; someone we trust can betray us. There are so many possibilities and it can be a bit depressing to realize that it doesn’t take much to break us.
• On storytelling – “Whatever is happening isn’t important. The important thing is how you explain it to people” I think this is hard to process when things are happening because that’s all that’s on your mind. In a way this an optimistic way of thinking. Not that we lie about what happened, but that our circumstances do not control our life, it’s how we tell the narrative.
• “You measure [marriage] from everyday life, at home, at its lowest level, from how you talk to each other and solve problems” I think this goes for all intimate relationships. The peaks and joys are lovely but it’s the mundane tasks, the compromises, the getting over hard times together that makes a relationship stronger.
• “Who are worse: the guys with tattoos on their necks or the suites and ties?” This quote makes me think about the people in society that we villainize. Is someone’s physical appearance representative of their moral integrity? Absolutely not. Yet we continue to make these assumptions because we were primed to do so and have a reluctance to go against our own belief system…that the government and the law should represent justice. When that belief is broken, and the covenant is violated where do we go? I think that’s what people fear the most and so they’d rather stick to the simple story.
• On change – “But for every step forward we take, we take an almost equally large step back. Seen over time, every change is so slow that it’s barely visible when it’s happening.” Change is messy, never linear, always frustrating, always slow. It’s hard to understand in the moment but in hindsight you appreciate the journey. I think the stumbles make looking back much more fun.
• On Grief – the question of whether grief passes or if we just get used to it. Still a mystery to me but my experience is that grief changes you and so you at the beginning and end of a traumatic event are no longer the same person. And maybe that’s how we handle grief – we just transform.

Favourite Quotes

“A great deal is expected of anyone’s who’s been given a lot”

“Grief is the price we pay for love”

“Everyone wants to get paid; the only difference is the preferred currency”

Anyone who feels responsibility isn’t free.

At some point almost everyone makes a choice. Some of us don’t even notice it happening, most don’t get to plan it in advance, but there’s always a moment when we take one path instead of another that has consequences for the rest of our lives. It determines the people we will become, in other people’s eyes as well as our own.

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”

Life is a weird thing. We spend all our time trying to manage different aspects of it, yet we are still largely shaped by things that happen beyond our control. We will never forget this year, not the best of it and not the worst. It will never stop influencing us.