Catch-up mini reviews! Part 4 - Non-fiction (1)

I was only going to do one non-fiction post, but I ended up rambling about all of the books too much, so I split it up instead. Yay!


Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

I LOVED this book. Really really loved it. I had never heard of Dear Sugar or the Rumpus before reading this, and I’m kind of sad that I hadn’t as I’m sure that a few years ago when I wasn't particularly happy I would have really appreciated reading them! As it is, pretty much none of the advice columns in the book were particularly relevant to anything that I'm struggling with now, but in spite of that I found all of the advice interesting, and really nicely written, and I think that almost anybody could read this and get something out of it (even if, like me, it’s just a feeling that were any of these things to happen to you, you would be much better emotionally and mentally prepared!). I really wish that this book had been around when I was a teenager, as I really could have done with some of the advice then (although I wasn't really open to listening to other people at that time anyway, so it probably wouldn't have helped much, hehe). 

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

I really wanted to love this book. I really did. As I wrote above, I REALLY enjoyed Tiny Beautiful Things, but in the end I think that I just wasn’t at the right place in my life to get much out of this. I found the bits about actually walking the trail really interesting, but I think that that kind of experience was much better covered by Bill Bryson in A Walk in the Woods… and I know that this shows a huge lack of empathy on my part, but I just ended up screaming in my head “AHH STOP BEING SUCH AN IDIOT!” a lot of the time… I think that had I read this when I was a teenager, or even 5 or 6 years ago I would have loved it, but I’m just not in that place at the moment, and I found it hard to find sympathy for the author while reading it. That isn’t to say that I don't understand and feel sympathy on some level, obviously a lot of messed up and not very nice things happened to her, but... I'm just not sure that I needed to read about her dealing with it in so much detail. This was obviously something that she had to go through in order to become the awesome person that she is today (or that she comes of as in Tiny Beautiful Things!) but I would have been much more interested in something that focused on the big picture of how she is now, and not a book that focuses so narrowly on one particular experience. I didn't hate it, but then I didn't feel particularly moved afterwards, and although it kept me reading, I'm not sure that I took anything away from it at all. Sigh!