The Last Lecture is quite a book.

It hits all the harder reading it for the first time now, knowing that Randy Pausch died a year after this lecture/book came out, but even that was a decade ago. His children are in high school/college now. His wife Jai eventually remarried. Some things change and move on. Some don’t.

There is a lot of good advice in this book and a lot of stories that really make you think. Conversely, there are quite a few of the sections wherein you realize just how lucky and, to some sense, privileged Randy Pausch was. Always carry $200 in your wallet? A life of well connected mentors and friends (that he helped to cultivate, granted)? He’s also very much an engineer. It shows both in how he looks at the world and how he tackles life.

So overall, Randy Pausch sounds like a good man. He cared about his family and tried to do the best he could with a crappy situation. It’s not necessarily a book for life advice, but it is an interesting read.

Really, the one thing is should do is make you wonder: what would my Last Lecture be like?