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Book of Numbers

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Book of Numbers

By: Joshua Cohen
Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
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About this listen

When the enigmatic billionaire founder and CEO of Tetration, the world's most powerful tech company, is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he hires a failed novelist, Josh Cohen, to ghostwrite his memoir.

This tech mogul, known only as 'Principal', takes Josh deep into his own mind. Accompanying Josh on a mind-bending world tour, Principal soon initiates Josh into the secret pretext of the autobiography project and the life-or-death stakes that surround its publication.

©2015 Joshua Cohen (P)2015 HighBridge Audio Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Technothrillers Thriller & Suspense Technology Fiction Thriller Suspense
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Regarding the performance. The style of this book is full of wordplays, quaint vocabulary, intentional misspellings, and unconventional use of punctuation. These are lost in the audiobook format. It is also for the most part very far removed from spoken English, which can feel hard to parse, and many rambly streams of consciousness might need rewinding to follow properly. I ended up getting the text to read along, and also found a few mistakes in the reading.

Regarding the style. I'm not familiar with this kind of experimental novel. I didn't despise it, but wasn't engaged either. The exotic language made the reading very painful; I'm a non native reader, but I assume that this would be straining to get through to some extent for everyone who isn't well versed in Jewish culture and technical jergon from computer science to geology to Egyptology; I am a computer scientist myself, though I haven't been a startup founder in the 1990s silicon valley, and much of the computer science slang made absolutely no sense to me. I had to choose between keeping a dictionary at hand and inferring meaning from context in a large percentage of sentences (sometimes failing to parse what I assume are wordplays altogether).

Regarding actual contents: the book is long, and strewn with ramblings which can be very convincing and skillful, and build up extremely well done characterizations, but are also quite tedious. Few sections of the plot do feel engaging, especially in the second half.

This is a meta-novel about writing; overall, if a person is a writer and is interested in a learning words they'll never use (like euphemisms to refer to fat women), reading about living as a writer in fancy New York circles, creative processes, writing autobiographies, self-absorbed and judgemental Jewish characters, quirky tech billionaires, and some casual racist point of views, you might enjoy this.

Not suited to audiobook format; skillful but dull

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