This was not an easy book to read. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking sounds like it might be about fairies or princesses, but it’s actually about the shifting mental stability and swirling chaos of having lost your life partner. It’s raw and unapologetic and terribly frank.
Some books are brilliant in their own merit – funny, thoughtful, fascinating. Other books are very difficult to judge objectively because they are so important to you or someone you love. I fear I may be falling into the latter category here with Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the first in a series of short, playful autobiographies by the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. Then again, it’s exactly the kind of book that pushes my buttons and gives me that insatiable itch for adventure. I must, in the end, enthusiastically endorse this book.
I specifically chose to read The Four-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris because it is such a large part of our collective knowledge at this point, or so I thought. I’ve heard the book referenced countless times in financial and personal and career development blogs. I thought I knew what it was about – creating efficiencies at work and eliminating distraction. What this book actually promotes is completely leaving a normal job and quite literally spending only 4 hours a week (or less) managing a business.