This book reduced me to a sobbing mess! A beautifully tragic account, even the more so because you know there's only one way it can end.

Randy Pausch, a computer scientist professor, only had months to live. When the university he taught at asked him to give a 'last lecture', Randy thought this would be a good way to leave behind a piece of himself for his young children who would grow up without him. He starts to reflect on his life and his childhood dreams and the advice that he would like to leave behind for them. And look, I'm crying just writing this review.

But it was not a book about dying. It was a book about living and how to make the most of the time we have. I challenge someone to read this book who does not close it thinking about their own life.

This book was told beautifully with the help of Jeffrey Zaslow, whose name I recognised from The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship, and I feel like he has done justice to a great man. The Last Lecture is a book that will sit on my shelf for the rest of my life, in times of need of inspiration, or when I have forgotten what this crazy thing called life is all about.