Consider a book-Books worth reading

John Cleese is best known for his roles in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Besides his appearance as Lancelot, The Black Knight, Tim, and the French Taunter, Cleese was perhaps the key writer to the beloved film.  So Anyway  is his autobiography and it falls right along the lines of his most famous work; it's irreverent, zany, and hilarious. When I decided to read this book, I was most interested in an analysis of monte python humor. Was the peasant's monologue about the origin of political power in  The Holly Grail  that is used in university law classes poetic coincidence or intentional genius? Was the opening cheese shop sketch monologue a deliberate lesson on vernacular or merely humor with a fortuitous vein of applicability? In many ways, I wasn't disappointed.  To me, the most important power of humor is the power it has to make us take ourselves less seriously. Cleese delves into his academic background as well as the background of the other pythons and engages

  I picked this up just prior to the taper phase before a marathon. My basic idea was that since i couldn't train my body anymore for the big event, I could at least discover some ways to push my mind. If this were a self-help book (it shares some characteristics) it would fall squarely in the inspirational-not informational quadrant. The "science" of the book can be reduced to an extremely useful mental model in the form of an equation. P=E*C where E is a value between 0 and 1. P= Performance, E=Effort, C= Capacity. The variable of focus for the book is effort, what does it take for people to "fire walk" their way to better performance? What gives you the ability to suffer? The implicit answer is wanting it bad enough. He spent a lot of time trying to complicate that equation but I didn't find that helpful or compelling.  There were some interesting bits about the specific impacts and origins of mental toughness. For example, for women, there is a causal li