On my bookshelf, there’s one shelf that I keep a couple of my favorite books, and on occasion, I rotate one book out for another as I finish a hard copy of a book that really stuck with me after flipping through its pages. When I was younger, it was mostly a shelf of fantasy and sci-fi novels; The Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time series took up most of the available space. I went through some phases when I collected technical books from school and work1, then self-help and improvement books, but nowadays—much like this blog—it’s a mish-mash of personal and professional interests with admittedly less turnover since I now do the vast majority of my reading via e-book readers anyway.
But combing through the shelf while plucking a heavy volume of the first The Complete Calvin & Hobbes tome, I rediscovered my copy of The Last Lecture, which I added to the shelf during my self-improvement phase of literature. It was a book written by a computer science professor at CMU by the name of Randy Pausch, who had only months to live after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and wanted to leave something for his family, friends, and most importantly, his 3 young kids. The Last Lecture also refers to an autobiographical lecture that he gave at CMU, which contained many of the same life lessons that he expounds further in the book. Coincidentally, CMU recently remastered that lecture and posted it to YouTube, some 17 years after the original recording.
It’s fascinating to reread this book after first encountering it some 18 years ago. I remember acknowledging the tragedy of his circumstances. Still, I was also excited to see how engaging and popular a CS academic, of all people, could be and inspire so many while breaking away from the stereotypes of elderly, tenured professors. I was only a few years out of college and still working in my first job, and I had seriously considered pursuing a Ph.D. before ultimately turning to industry. A part of me was still ready to make the leap, though in retrospect I would likely make for a boring lecturer.
The book resonates a bit differently in 2025, when I’m much closer in age to Randy when he wrote it, and I’m following along with close empathy as I relate to life now with a spouse and kids, and with more years of life experience. While I in no way can compare to his professional highlights—to float in zero gravity or work as a Disney Imagineering consultant—I’d still like to think that the ebbs and flows of friends, family, work and life are relatable. Say, from one middle-aged dad to another.
Upon the reread, The Last Lecture remains one of my favorite books. For me, its quality is largely due to its down-to-earth stories, part autobiographical and part self-help. It certainly helps to be a well-regarded professor and lecturer—Randy narrates these snapshots of his life with heartfelt storytelling, and there’s no agenda or salesmanship to his writing beyond sharing life experiences and lessons. From his grade school football coach to meeting his wife to aphorisms from his father to bits of career success, his story touches, fleetingly, on all aspects of his personal and professional upbringing. If there’s any hint of indulgence—and it’s hard to fault a guy who had, and knew he had, only months to live—there are a few sections that come off as a bit of self-promotion, to create and spin a posthumous legacy.
And he largely succeeded in that goal.
Mostly programming classics like K&R and Design Patterns and the like.↩
