This is the third (and a half) book I've read by Fredrik Backman. With such a long title, I can't say I would have chosen to read it, even with liking Backman, but no, I'm kidding there, I would have read it if I had known about it. Fortunately, my family knew about it and let me know about it, and it's adorable.

Imagine having a cranky old grandmother who is just awful and awesome at the same time. Now imagine being seven, almost eight, and having a mind of your own and the enviornment where you can speak it. Okay, okay, you're considered weird, and are in trouble a lot, and the school kids pick on your ALL THE F'ING TIME, but Granny!

Okay, not really.

Anyway, smart kid, dying grandmother, a mystery to solve, and a life to unfold. As kids, we don't realize that the adults around us have a history before us. Backman writes that clouded view and gives us a child's view of navigating grief and anger and life.

I enjoyed this book. The storytelling slowed me down a few times, I had to reread parts, and skipped over small parts when I was tired and figured the details would come back later when I needed them. It's a cute story, worth reading.

She shouldn’t take any notice of what those muppets think, says Granny. Because all the best people are different—look at superheroes. After all, if superpowers were normal, everyone would have them.
Page 1

“Stop fussing. You sound like your mother. Do you have a lighter?”

“I’m seven!”

“How long are you going to use that as an excuse?”

“Until I’m not seven anymore?”
Page 5

Granny has had nine different nurses since she was admitted. Seven of these she refused to cooperate with, and two refused to cooperate with her, one of them because Granny said he had a “nice ass.” Granny insists it was a compliment to his ass, not to him, and he shouldn’t make such a fuss about it. Then Mum told Elsa to put on her headphones, but Elsa still heard their argument about the difference between “sexual harassment” and “basic appreciation of a perfectly splendid ass.”
Page 16

She sits reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the iPad for about the twelfth time. It’s the Harry Potter book she likes the least; that’s why she’s read it so few times.
Page 22

It’s very difficult not to love someone who can hear you say something as horrible as that and still be on your side.
Page 25

Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild’s ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details. Even when you are wrong. Especially then, in fact.
Page 45

Granny says people who think slowly always accuse quick thinkers of concentration problems. “Idiots can’t understand that non-idiots are done with a thought and already moving on to the next before they themselves have. That’s why idiots are always so scared and aggressive. Because nothing scares idiots more than a smart girl.”
Page 47

Words I wish my granny had told me, though now that I think about it, I suspect Scott tried.

They sit there in the sort of silent eternity that only mothers and daughters can build up between themselves.
Page 66

People who have never been hunted always seem to think there’s a reason for it. “They wouldn’t do it without a cause, would they? You must have done something to provoke them.” As if that’s how oppression works.
Page 80

Like all hunters, shadows have one really significant weakness: they focus all their attention on the one they’re pursuing, rather than seeing their entire surroundings. The one being chased, on the other hand, devotes every scrap of attention to finding an escape route.
Page 83

“Sometimes the safest place is when you flee to what seems the most dangerous,” said Granny, and then she described how the prince rode right into the darkest forest and the shadows stopped, hissing, at the edge. For not even they were sure what might be lurking inside, on the other side of the trees, and nothing scares anyone more than the unknown, which can only be known by reliance on the imagination. “When it comes to terror, reality’s got nothing on the power of the imagination,” Granny said.
Page 84

All fairy stories take their life from the fact of being different. “Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”
Page 89

Only then does Elsa realize that it actually couldn’t have had a chance to relieve itself for several days, unless it did so inside its flat. Which she rules out because she can’t see how it could have maneuvered itself into using a toilet, and it certainly wouldn’t have crapped on the floor, because this is not the sort of thing a wurse would demean itself by doing. So she assumes that one of the wurse’s superpowers is clenching.
Page 107

Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow.
Page 126

“Because when you love someone very much, it’s difficult to learn to share her with someone else.”
Page 135

“I think your grandmother functioned so well in chaotic places because she was herself chaotic. She was always amazing in the midst of a catastrophe. It was just all this, everyday life and normality, that she didn’t quite know how to handle."
Page 145

The walls of the office are covered in bookshelves. Elsa has never seen so many books outside a library. She wonders if the woman in the black skirt has ever heard of an iPad.
Page 170

Oh, I love libraries, personal and public.

It’s strange how quickly the significance of a certain smell can change, depending on what path it decides to take through the brain. It’s strange how close love and fear live to each other.
Page 195

“Never mess with someone who has more spare time than you do,” Granny used to say. Elsa used to translate that as, “Never mess with someone who’s perky for her age.”
Page 196

It’s easier to get people talking about things they dislike than things they like, Elsa has noticed. And it’s easier not to get frightened of shadows in the dark when someone is talking, whatever they’re talking about.
Page 198

If you don’t like people, they can’t hurt you.
Page 209

“It’s hard to help those who don’t want to help themselves.”

“Someone who wants to help himself is possibly not the one who most needs help from others,” Elsa objects.
Page 213

But she doesn’t want to disappoint him, so she stays quiet. Because you hardly ever disappoint anybody if you just stay quiet.
Page 217

The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make the people left behind want to stop living, she thinks, without remembering where she heard that.
Page 220

Death was Granny’s nemesis. That’s why she never wanted to talk about it. And that was also why she became a surgeon, to cause death as much trouble as she could.
Page 220

People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn’t true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn’t be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.
Page 220

Fears are like cigarettes, said Granny: the hard thing isn’t stopping, it’s not starting.
Page 230

“Sometimes it’s hard to share one’s sorrow with people one doesn’t know."
Page 243

“Don’t fight with monsters, for you can become one. If you look into the abyss for long enough, the abyss looks into you.”
Page 243

“Granny always said: ‘Don’t kick the shit, it’ll go all over the place!’ ”
Page 244

Looks like dads do when it suddenly dawns on them that something they used to do because it was important to their daughters has now become one of those things their daughters do because it’s important to their dads. It’s a very thin line to cross. Neither dads nor their daughters ever forget when they do cross it.
Page 260

She hates that Mum has secrets from her. When you know someone is keeping secrets from you it makes you feel like an idiot, and no one likes feeling like an idiot.
Page 272

“Most likely they told her a whole lot of damned things she wasn’t allowed to do, for a range of different reasons. But she damned well did them all the same. A few years after she was born they were still telling girls they couldn’t vote in the bleeding elections, but now the girls do it all the same. That’s damned well how you stand up to bastards who tell you what you can and can’t do. You bloody do those things all the bloody same.”
Page 280

“Why are you so horrible to each other if you’re brothers?”

“You don’t get to choose your siblings,” mutters Alf.
Page 285

Bowled over by this, Elsa looks at him and waits, because she knows that only by waiting will she get him to tell the whole story. You know things like that when you’re almost eight. She waits for as long as she needs to.
Page 308

It’s snowing again, and Elsa decides that even if people she likes have been shits on earlier occasions, she has to learn to carry on liking them. You’d quickly run out of people if you had to disqualify all those who at some point have been shits.
Page 315

Now and then Elsa would ask Granny why grown-ups were always doing such idiotic things to each other. Granny usually answered that it was because grown-ups are generally people, and people are generally shits.

Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit. The hard part of life is keeping as much on the not-a-shit side as one can.
Page 331

Tell him that sometimes things have to clear a space so something else can take its place.
Page 340

The problem is this whole issue of heroes at the ends of fairy tales, and how they are supposed to “live happily to the end of their days.” This gets tricky, from a narrative perspective, because the people who reach the end of their days must leave others who have to live out their days without them. It is very, very difficult to be the one who has to stay behind and live without them.
Page 341

A funeral can go on for weeks, because few events in life are a better opportunity to tell stories. Admittedly on the first day it’s mainly stories about sorrow and loss, but gradually as the days and nights pass, they transform into the sorts of stories that you can’t tell without bursting out laughing.
Page 353

“So why are you together, then?”

“Because we accept each other as we are, perhaps.”

“And you and Mum tried to change each other?”
Page 357

Note to self during reading: Why did I start reading this book? My goodness, this book is powerful.

Okay, first up, this book made me cry. It goes in the rare amazing category of "this book is amazing and/or life-changing, let me buy you a copy" books.

I started this book today, and finished this book today. I wanted something slightly different than the yet-another-astrophysics book I was reading, and picked this one up. And didn't put it down.

And I cried. So much of this book is about the unfairness of life, how the good are cut down too soon, how life takes unexpected turns, how much of life is loss, how we all struggle, and how beautiful a life can be when it has a passion, has meaning.

I don't know. In some ways, it was yet another reminder of how much of my life I have done wrong. That makes it a good book, I'd say, a book that causes self-reflection. As Kalanithi asks, "If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?"

I'm not spoiling anything by saying, hey, he dies in the end. We all die in the end. Not all of us go out gracefully, or so soon. Not all of us live as well or as intensely.

I will be rereading this book. It's amazing, let me buy you a copy.

I spent the next year in classrooms in the English countryside, where I found myself increasingly often arguing that direct experience of life-and-death questions was essential to generating substantial moral opinions about them. Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried them.
Page 43

Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.
Page 43

The neatness of medical diagrams did nothing to represent Nature, red not only in tooth and claw but in birth as well.
Page 63

I still had a lot of practical medicine to learn, but would knowledge alone be enough, with life and death hanging in the balance? Surely intelligence wasn’t enough; moral clarity was needed as well. Somehow, I had to believe, I would gain not only knowledge but wisdom, too.
Page 66

By the end of the conversation, the family was not at ease, but they seemed able to face the future. I had watched the parents’ faces—at first wan, dull, almost otherworldly—sharpen and focus.
Page 70

At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living.
Page 71

Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?
Page 71

Drowning, even in blood, one adapts, learns to float, to swim, even to enjoy life, bonding with the nurses, doctors, and others who are clinging to the same raft, caught in the same tide.
Page 81

When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.
Page 87

I had to help those families understand that the person they knew—the full, vital independent human—now lived only in the past and that I needed their input to understand what sort of future he or she would want: an easy death or to be strung between bags of fluids going in, others coming out, to persist despite being unable to struggle.
Page 87

To me, that hardness always seems brittle, unrealistic optimism the only alternative to crushing despair.
Page 96

Openness to human relationality does not mean revealing grand truths from the apse; it means meeting patients where they are, in the narthex or nave, and bringing them as far as you can.
Page 96

Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.
Page 98

While most scientists connived to publish in the most prestigious journals and get their names out there, V maintained that our only obligation was to be authentic to the scientific story and to tell it uncompromisingly.
Page 100

He paused. “Paul,” he said, “do you think my life has meaning? Did I make the right choices?”
Page 101

If boredom is, as Heidegger argued, the awareness of time passing, then surgery felt like the opposite: the intense focus made the arms of the clock seem arbitrarily placed.
Page 104

Doctors in highly charged fields met patients at inflected moments, the most authentic moments, where life and identity were under threat; their duty included learning what made that particular patient’s life worth living, and planning to save those things if possible—or to allow the peace of death if not.
Page 113

Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms.
Page 114

Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn’t. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients.
Page 114

Part II: Cease Not till Death

It felt less like an epiphany—a piercing burst of light, illuminating What Really Matters—and more like someone had just firebombed the path forward. Now I would have to work around it.
Page 120

“I think she likes you.” “And?” “Well, there’s that study that says doctors do a worse job prognosticating for patients they’re personally invested in.”
Page 131

I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.
Page 131

Yes, all cancer patients are unlucky, but there’s cancer, and then there’s CANCER, and you have to be really unlucky to have the latter.
Page 133

What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide but existential authenticity each person must find on her own. Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.
Page 135

If the weight of mortality does not grow lighter, does it at least get more familiar?
Page 138

Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.
Page 143

After so many years of living with death, I’d come to understand that the easiest death wasn’t necessarily the best.
Page 143

The monolithic uncertainty of my future was deadening; everywhere I turned, the shadow of death obscured the meaning of any action.
Page 149

Why? Because I could. Because that’s who I was. Because I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.
Page 149

Moral duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity, and so the duty to bear mortal responsibility pulled me back into the operating room.
Page 151

The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out.
Page 160

The way forward would seem obvious, if only I knew how many months or years I had left. Tell me three months, I’d spend time with family. Tell me one year, I’d write a book. Give me ten years, I’d get back to treating diseases. The truth that you live one day at a time didn’t help: What was I supposed to do with that day?
Page 161

She had done what I had challenged myself to do as a doctor years earlier: accepted mortal responsibility for my soul and returned me to a point where I could return to myself.
Page 163

I didn’t know. But if I did not know what I wanted, I had learned something, something not found in Hippocrates, Maimonides, or Osler: the physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.
Page 166

It featured a frustrated Jesus whose metaphorical language receives literal interpretation from his followers:
Page 167

Not only that, but maybe the basic message of original sin isn’t “Feel guilty all the time.” Maybe it is more along these lines: “We all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can’t live up to it all the time.” Maybe that’s what the message of the New Testament is, after all. Even if you have a notion as well defined as Leviticus, you can’t live that way. It’s not just impossible, it’s insane.
Page 171

There we were, doctor and patient, in a relationship that sometimes carries a magisterial air and other times, like now, was no more, and no less, than two people huddled together, as one faces the abyss.
Page 193

Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present.
Page 198

Epilogue by Lucy Kalanithi

Paul’s decision not to avert his eyes from death epitomizes a fortitude we don’t celebrate enough in our death-avoidant culture.
Page 215

“Bereavement is not the truncation of married love,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “but one of its regular phases—like the honeymoon. What we want is to live our marriage well and faithfully through that phase too.”
Page 224