cahn

5/5. This book is a collection of Strayed's Dear Sugar columns. These are not your run-of-the-mill advice columns. These columns make me cry -- Well, okay, you say skeptically, everything makes you cry, including blatant manipulation! -- it's true. But not only do they make me cry, they occasionally also leave me gasping for breath as not many things do, as though -- do any of you remember, at the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the water that was stronger than wine, like liquid light? Strayed is an atheist; her columns remind me of that line.

(I should include a caveat here: not all her columns are created equal. Some are amazing; some are fascinating; some did nothing for me. But all of them... well, as

lightreads said in her insightful review, all of them strive to have that ring of truth, even if they sometimes fall short of that.)

I do not, actually, recommend you buy this book on my recommendation. What I do recommend is for you to go read some Dear Sugar. Once you have done so and realize you need a hardcopy, then go buy the book. Full warning, though: when I was first linked to Dear Sugar, I spent a day reading them instead of working and had to make up the work on the weekend. So consider yourself warned.