This is my favorite book so far this year. Hilarious, and even more so if you’ve lived in Seattle, though that’s not really a requirement. I listened to the audiobook as read by Kathleen Wilhoite. Ms. Wilhoite does a wonderful job with the various difference characters, especially Bee and Bernadette and also a nice job of singing at one point. It’s a crazy plot but it just carries you along. The reviewers at Audible.com have described it well without giving away secrets. Highly recommended.

The title is “Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: Selected Letters of Richard Feynman”. I recommend this audiobook to anyone who is interested in Richard Feynman. I’ve plenty of stories about him over the years but I did not know he was such a good letter writer. The two narrators usually alternate, with Johanna Parker reading the letter that’s written to Feynman and Richard Poe reading Feynman’s response. There’s a wide range of letters, from close friends and family, to colleagues and to strangers who wrote to ask for something or to complain about something. His responses to the strangers are often the most interesting, succinct and right to the point. The restraint he can show with some of the complaints is a model for the rest of us. I could not have guessed this book would have been as interesting and enjoyable as it turned out.

One of my favorite science fiction authors, John Scalzi, writes about his book, “Old Man’s War”, which also happens to be one of my favorites. Life changing experiences are interesting.