Driving Mr. Albert

It’s late, and I should get to bed, but I wanted to take just a brief moment to comment on a book I read a few months ago entitled, Driving Mr. Albert : A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain.  This book holds the current record for “sitting on my bookshelf for the longest period of time without being read”.  I seriously started to read this book, then gave up on it, at least three different times before I finally forced myself to finish it.  I was determined to not let this book be my literary Waterloo but it was a tough battle, and the book nearly won.  It was seriously one of the dullest stories I’ve ever encountered.  When I first read about the book after its release I thought it would be a masterpiece—how could a book about driving across America with Albert Einstein’s brain in a Tupperware container be anything but entralling?!  In reality, it was a boring book with boring characters, and would have been fascinating if condensed as a 6 page magazine article.  Anything longer than that just seemed like filler.  The real star of this story is the brain itself, floating in little chunks in a plastic bowl.  Other than that, the rest of the cast are sort of pathetic.  I have a feeling the author thought the premise of the story was great, but when he took the actual roadtrip he realized he’d have nothing to write about, but then he forced himself to write the book anyway.  And I forced myself to read it, so now we’re even.  When I finished reading it, I mailed it to a friend in Florida as a gag gift—I don’t think I’ve ever given away a book before.  I think it has a future as a doorstop or table-leg-equalizer or something.  Blech.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 02/10 at 12:48 AM

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