For years, I’ve maintained a to-be-read list of books to borrow from my library, the Howe in Hanover, NH. That list—penned and penciled into a small blank book—had become impossible to use so recently I re-did the whole thing.

While slogging through that project—which included double-checking that each author was on the library’s shelves and also looking at reviews on the Amazon website—I realized I needed to go to the library.

Now, I have never been a fan of biographies or memoirs, especially memoirs, but I ended up in that section on the hunt for Lucy Worsley’s bio of Jane Austen. It wasn’t on the shelf—there’s a BIG birthday bash for Jane this year so that was not a surprise—but my wandering eye was caught by another author’s familiar name—Fredrik Backman.

This is the man who wrote A Man Called Ove (pronounced oh-vay), the book that was a HUGE hit in 2012, well-deserved in my opinion. The volume I had found on the shelf was a sort-of memoir of Backman’s experience as a first-time parent called Things My Son Needs to Know about the World. It was written shortly after the birth of his son, and is addressed to the newborn.

Backman is one of those authors who comes along every once in a while brandishing a very sharp sense of humor coupled with an intensely incisive perspective on humans in all our bizarre, kind, thoughtless, and intensely caring ways. I’ve read two more of his novels since Ove, and I marvel at his remarkable ability to make me laugh out loud on page 35 and cry really hard by page 40.

Backman bills this short book of pungent essays as a “guide to dysfunctional parenting,” but really, it’s anything but. Like his novels, it’s laugh-out-loud funny and absurd and fascinating. Which brings me to this sample from the chapter he called “What You Need to Know about Being a Man” because I want to encourage you to give him a try.

Here goes:
“I know I’m still learning about what the word ‘inequality’ really means. Every day. I have to. I’m a white, heterosexual, Western European man with an education and a job. There’s not a single organism in the entire universe who knows less about inequality than me.

“But I’m trying to learn. And I hope you’ll know more than I did.

“That you’ll never fear justice. Never misinterpret the fight for equality as a war between the sexes. That you’ll never believe that a woman doesn’t deserve the same rights or freedoms or chances that you do. I hope you’ll know that, above all, most people are not looking for special treatment, most people don’t want everything to be the same for everyone, most people just want things to be FAIR for everyone.

“I hope you’ll get that, way faster than I did. And I hope that you’ll never get it into your head that just because a woman deserves every opportunity you do, you have to stop holding the door open for her when you can. That you’ll never think it’s impossible to be equals and behave like a gentleman at the same time. Because as your grandmothers will teach you, that’s rubbish.

“There is plenty that can be said about your grandfathers’ generation, but they wouldn’t have had time to learn about everything in the world if the woman of their generation hadn’t taken care of everything else while they did.

“And I’ve done what I can to teach you to never feel threatened by strong women. I married the strongest one I’ve ever met.”

Imagine what the world would be like if every male human being understood what Backman does. Now really, don’t you think you should treat yourself to at least one book by a man who can write like this?