I love this book. I immediately passed it on to others I know who would appreciate an honest in-depth look at grief and what it can do to a family. A heavy topic, I know. But wow. After reading Wild and loving it for the honesty and insight into human nature, determination and vulnerabilities, I knew that anything else she wrote would be well worth reading. Her characters and settings are just so real you can feel their presence.

In her debut novel, Torch, bestselling author Cheryl Strayed weaves a searing and luminous tale of a family's grief after unexpected loss. Theresa May Wood has fled a bad marriage and rebuilt a life with her children, Claire and Joshua, and their caring stepfather, Bruce. Their love for each other binds them as a family through the daily struggles of making ends meet. But when they receive unexpected news that Theresa, only 38, is dying of cancer, their lives all begin to unravel and drift apart. Strayed's intimate portraits of these fully human characters in a time of crisis show the varying truths of grief, forgiveness, and the beautiful terrors of learning how to keep living.

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11:30

I'm almost done reading the ebook version of Tolstoy's Boyhood on my phone, and absolutely loving it. His writing, wisdom and insight into the human condition - even as seen through a boy's eyes - is astounding. So there I am reading under the covers at 2am highlighting great swaths of text to reread during daylight hours perchance to absorb them in a more conscious state.

to wit:

I loved Papa, but the intellect is independent of the heart, and often gives birth to thoughts which offend and are harsh and incomprehensible to the feelings. And it was thoughts of this kind that, for all I strove to put them away, arose at that moment in my mind.

Another time, suddenly bethinking me that death might find me at any hour or any minute, I came to the conclusion that man could only be happy by using the present to the full and taking no thought for the future. Indeed, I wondered how people had never found that out before. Acting under the influence of the new idea, I laid my lesson-books aside for two or three days, and, reposing on my bed, gave myself up to novel-reading and the eating of gingerbread and honey which I had bought with my last remaining coins. 

But one cannot always remain the same - one must change a little sometimes.

So delicious was the wondrous scent of birch trees, violets, mushrooms, and thyme, that I could no longer remain in the britchka. Jumping out, I ran to some bushes, and, regardless of the showers of drops discharged upon me, tore off a few sprigs of thyme, and buried my face in them to smell their glorious scent.  

Sometimes I would suppose that happiness depends, not upon external causes themselves, but only upon our relation to them, and that, provided a man can accustom himself to bearing suffering, he need never be unhappy.

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04:13