Leonardo Da Vinci

Author: Walter Isaacson

DISCLAIMER: These are private notes I wrote in my public library app about the book prior to creating this site and tracking and writing about all my reading here. I am pasting those notes into this site to consolidate everything. These notes are rough, unintelligent, and pasted as is (spelling mistakes and all). Enjoy.

I decided to include this on my shelf after my last review of the Devil in the White City. Full disclosure, I did not finish this absolute leviathan of a book. Why did I not finish it? It had such great reviews? You get to learn about the brilliant genius of the guy from the Titanic. Because it sucks. 600 pages of every possible detail of every possible detail of every possible detail. “Leo would write with a bic ballpoint pen, that he acquired from a nearby shop on a rainy Tuesday. The pen had a full tank of ink when he started using it, and over time as he used it more, the ink would slowly drain out. One day while writing, the pen ran out of ink. So Leo had to run back to Staples and buy another pen. But this time, his creative genius inspired him to use an HB no 2 pencil instead of a pen. It was earth shattering. The day that Leo bought the pencil, he had a mild tickle in his throat, and coughed a number of times that day. Some scholars estimate that he coughed as many as 25 times that day, but it could have been as little as 8. Demand for lozenges was at an all time high after that incident. The way in which Leo coughed, was mesmerizing and truly reflected his brilliance. We can learn a great lesson from his cough” That was an excerpt from somewhere in the middle of the book Im sure. Im curious who ACTUALLY liked this book vs the droves of people who read it just to puff up their “i Am vErY sMarT” ego. It’s just not worth it. Some people SHOULD really like this book: My great grandmothers mom, her dad, and her dads uncle. Maybe a handful of historians studying that era, Leo and his inventions. Everyone else should admit that they hate this book and stop leaving reviews like it was brilliantly insightful and you have somehow absorbed Leo’s genius by reading his book, because we all know that is what you are trying to imply by shouting from every imaginable rooftop that you read this book. Carrying it with you while you travel places with a pen in your ear and a notebook in your hand. These people probably read the book, and then went straight to indigo and buy a brown notebook with the hopes of it being made into a 600 page book explaining all their brilliant thoughts/inventions. 2 years later though, the notebook is found covered in 8 layers of dust and the only three pages filled out in it are a reminder to buy toilet paper, a random phone number with no contact assigned and three paragraphs for an invention idea you have that automatically dips your corndog in ketchup.