Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar Paperback – July 10, 2012

I found a recommendation for this book when I was searching for a graduation gift for a friend. I did not get the book for him, but was intrigued enough to buy a copy for myself. Each chapter (or Q & A) is unique and thought-provoking. Once I began reading it I had a difficult time putting it down. Each day I'd look forward to reading a few more chapters, like a private retreat from my day. In fact, I was dreading finishing the book because I knew I'd miss the stories!

I first bought (and read) Tiny Beautiful Things when I was at a low point in my life. Two days before, I found out that the company I loved working for and the job that I was flourishing at were closing. I spent two days in bed crying and finally picked up my kindle to distract my mind. I had never read or heard of Dear Sugar or Cheryl Strayed (before Wild at least). I read it through twice without putting the book down. I laughed, I cried, I found something that resonated in parts of me that had gone cold. I can't even start to tell you how much this book meant and continues to mean to me. Through the worst times of my life, I constantly turn back to this book. Sugar is sweet, nonjudgmental, understanding, and most of all, not afraid to tell it like it is. She's the best friend I wish I had in my ear to help me through some of the trials of life. The book is such a wonderful combination of advice, memoir, humor, and tell it like it is advice. It's hilarious, sad, and most of all honest. You can tell she's spent hours mulling over every piece of advice that she gives. It's cut through the bulls*** honest. It's what so many young adults (and many others) need to hear. I've bought this book for so many people since. It's that book that you know will touch people. I would recommend this from the top of the tallest building in the world. If you're debating reading this, just stop. Stop and go read it now. It's a quick and moving read. Just do it, you won't regret it.

Strayed does wonders with this book. Each letter is essential and, as a whole, walk one through a very comprehensive range of emotions and situations. For me it was soothing to read during a not so easy personal time, her responses to readers always guiding me to find light and relativize my own approaches to life. She is authentic, her responses are incredibly well constructed and powerful, and in the few pages she delivers a magic to simple and not so simple topics. She doesn’t simplify anything, nor complicate anything - and that balanced viewpoint is so refreshing and utterly necessary today.

I have to confess that I am constitutionally incapable of restraining myself from reading advice columns whenever I encounter them (which, given the ever-diminishing presence of print journalism in my life, has not been often of late). I am unable to avoid reading the damn things the same way that I am unable to stop myself from glancing over at the wreckage when I finally reach the scene of the accident that has caused me to spend the last hour of my life stuck in a hellish traffic jam. I always read the letters, formulate my own response in my head, and then compare notes with the advice-giver, and then either silently congratulate the adviser on her perspicacity if she agrees with me, or smugly pity her for her ignorance if she does not. This book came, then, as quite a shock to me, because Ms. Strayed's responses rarely agreed with the one I had prepared, and I found myself kicking myself for failing to come up with her answer, which was invariable straightforward, simple and profound in the way that only simple straightforward answers to knotty problems can be.This is a collection of advice columns Cheryl Strayed wrote under the pseudonym 'Sugar' for an online literary community called The Rumpus, and in it she has managed to revitalize the tired old advice-for-the-perplexed schtick by breaking one of the cardinal rules of the genre: Thou shalt keep thy private life and troubles out of thy column. As a striking example, consider her answer to 'WTF': Dear Sugar, WTF, WTF, WTF? I’m asking this question as it applies to everything every day. Dear WTF, My father’s father made me jack him off when I was three and four and five. I wasn’t any good at it. My hands were too small and I couldn’t get the rhythm right and I didn’t understand what I was doing. I only knew I didn’t want to do it. Knew that it made me feel miserable and anxious in a way so sickeningly particular that I can feel that same particular sickness rising this very minute in my throat.You see what I mean? You now know more about Cheryl Strayed as a human being than you would know about Abigail Van Buren after a lifetime of reading her columns. And, the advice is both excellent because true and true because excavated from the scary place in the dark rooms of the mind where such truths live. This is a transformative book; this is a book to be treasured and referred to like an oracle - the I Ching, say, for a late post-industrial capitalist world inhabited by armies of the ethically befuddled and morally perplexed. Read it through once, certainly; but then, keep it close at hand and dip into it for a nice bracing cup of in-your-face honest-to-God truth-saying. Highly recommended to adults of all ages.

Estou terminando de ler o livro na mesma semana em que completei 40 anos. Ele é maravilhoso.

Excellent book. Highly enjoyed each and every bit of it. Sugar is very wise. This soothed my soul. Thanks, Kindle!

Un poco pesado de leer pero en general tiene muy buenos mensajes y consejos

One of the most powerful, wise and thought-provoking books I’ve ever read. It’s not a book to race through, tempting as that may be. It’s a book to savour, to ponder, to ruminate on. Sugar’s ability to understand, empathise and shine a light in the darkest of circumstances is astonishing. Am deeply humbled.

This book is amazing! It'll make you laugh and cry at the same time! It's written in the form of letters from different kinds of people covering a variety of life problems. You will definitely be able to relate directly or indirectly with some or the other letter. In the end, you'll realize that your problems are nothing in front of the problems that other people face. After reading this book, you'll be more grateful for all that you have!