cahn: (Default)
cahn ([personal profile] cahn) wrote2012-12-05 02:11 pm

tiny beautiful things (Strayed)

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 [personal profile] 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.