Cynically Sweet (Booklikes)

"Are you living your resume or your eulogy?" is a book by Richard Sauerman which contains short (really short) stories and several motivational passages. Apart from the initial cover question, it looks at where you're spending your time and asks you whether it's worth it. Is your nine to five job really worth the time you're spending away from your family? What about all that overtime and the furthered education? What about all of your assets; do you really need all that money and stuff? It's essentially a book which gets the reader to question what type of life they lead vs. the type of life they think they should be leading.

Personally, I think that I'm kind of disappointed in the book. One of the questions it asks is whether we're spending our time appropriately and whether we ought to be wasting it on certain things, yet it brings up references to movies and television programs that I have no desire to see. Why would I, as a general reader, take my precious time to take a lesson from characters I don't admire or storylines I don't understand? Many of the anecdotes and short stories are fairly common things that can be found on the internet already, some of them very generic. Others are twisted from stories his friends (or friend of friends) or his family has relayed to him. It just seems like the author isn't even leading his life to the fullest if he has so few original stories to tell us. Apart from that, I didn't find many of the passages to be very relevant to me. They're fairly common motivational messages, some things I've basically read already in the one or two other motivational books I've read, and didn't convey that "wow" factor.

I'll keep this short as I'm sure many of you have better things to do than continue reading my review. To summarise, it was a somewhat stereotypical motivational book which didn't inspire me in the least or offer me much original material. There are some good short stories and a bit of humour. It's a reasonable book, but I think others might find more from this book than I did.

I won a copy of this book via a First Reads giveaway and these are just my honest thoughts on it.