Codex

By: Lev Grossman

Narrated by: Jeff Harding

About to depart on his first vacation in years, Edward Wozny, a hotshot young investment banker, is sent to help one of his firm's most important and mysterious clients. His task is to search their library stacks for a precious medieval codex, a treasure kept sealed away for many years and for many reasons. Enlisting the help of passionate medievalist Margaret Napier, Edward is determined to solve the mystery of the codex-to understand its significance to his wealthy clients, and to decipher the seeming parallels between the legend of the codex and an obsessive role-playing computer game that has absorbed him in the dark hours of the night.

The chilling resolution brings together the medieval and the modern aspects of the plot in a twist worthy of earning comparisons to novels by William Gibson and Dan Brown, not to mention those by A. S. Byatt and Umberto Eco. Lev Grossman's Codex is a thriller of the highest order.

©2005 Lev Grossman (P)2012 Random House

Critic reviews

"A genuine treat, with its sneaky plot and richly textured storytelling. Moves so fast that readers won't realize how smart it is." ( San Francisco Chronicle)

"Fascinating, compelling, and deliciously disturbing." ( The Boston Globe)

"Takes its place on the shelf of self-referential, bibliophilic page-turners like The Name of the Rose, Possession and A Case of Curiosities, and it's as entertaining as any of them." ( The New York Times Book Review)

Mind Games

Lev Grossman's great writing draws the reader into this engrossing story of a young investment banker on the fast track who, at first reluctantly and then increasingly willingly, is drawn into a world where the lines between unreality/virtual reality, sanity/insanity and accurate perception/delusion blur. Although the plot revolves around a, perhaps nonexistent, ancient manuscript, comparisons with Dan Brown are misplaced. If what you are interested in is a standard thriller with dead bodies, action-figure heroes and a conclusion where all the lose ends are neatly, if implausibly, tied up, then this is not the book for you. But if you are intrigued by the enigmas of the human mind and the impossibility of fully knowing oneself, let alone others, then you will find this book a great listen.

Wonderful for technical detail - only

First, if you haven't read his 3 volumes about Magicians, go do that. It/they is/are world class wonderful
This book not so much. He has, and displays extremely well, an exciting knowledge of - yes, really - library; wrong word but he's got solid material and displays and uses it very well.
Plot is - sigh - shaky with logical and common sense 'gaps'.
Read to me like a first novel and not nearly as bad as other 'firsts' I've read.
Reader/performers, regrettably, don't add to the book.
Has Mr. G other books?
I'd try another than this without hesitation.

Not what I expected

It is a good book, but I was hoping it would be more like the magician's and the ending was very anticlimactic!

Weirdly disjointed

This book jumped from episode to different episode, interweaving scenes from a computer game with scenes of a real story. I liked the parts dealing with mechanics of 13th century books, but never did understand what the parts with the computer action had to do with the rest of the book.

Brilliant Book Detection, Pathetic Protagonist

The story of a book detective was both new and fascinating. I learned a lot about medieval books, medieval book processing and medieval cultural attitudes about books. Lev Grossman excels at making the hunt through bibliographies and catalogues as intensely suspenseful as dodging a gunsel while looking for a black bird. The side characters are likable and fully fleshed out with their own interests and motivations. Even the ending of the book was technically well executed, but emotionally distant because the protagonist is simply unlikeable and unbelievable.

Like the protagonist of The Magicians, the protagonist in Codex is oddly off-putting and somewhat cartoonish. He neither acts, thinks nor feels like a real person. Instead, he is relentlessly and unchangingly self-indulgent, pampered and self-absorbed–the reductio absurdum result of helicopter parenting. He uses people for his convenience. He does not understand that to receive loyalty one must in turn be loyal. Perhaps that was the point that Lev Grossman was trying to make, but the protagonist’s sheer, perverse inability to learn or change at all makes him unbelievable as well as unlikeable.

Conversely, Jeff Harding’s performance is excellent. I have not heard any readers actually use falsetto before, but he does it with such skill and conviction that it sounds natural instead of forced.

I will probably never read a Lev Grossman book, but I will also probably listen to any book he publishes because he is creative and interesting, and because the life breathed into his books by his readers makes up any shortcomings in the personalities of his characters.

Good book, mostly good narration with poor pronunciation

This is my first review after years and hundreds of books. Hey it’s a good book and worth reading in spite of what I’m about to say. But this narrator keeps on mispronouncing words that reveals his apparent lack of education? Like he says “de-bahk-leh” for “debacle” and mispronounced “paper mache” in a way that shows he doesn’t know that word either. It took a bunch of mispronunciations to realize this narrator was actually doing it unintentionally.

Guess it comes down to, especially in a book about scholarly adventures, it’s all the more highlighting the degrading of literacy in our modern world.

Jeff Harding: you’ve been a great narrator for many books I’ve listened to so am frankly confused how this one you’ve performed this way.

That all said: the book is still enjoyable

It's not the worst

It's a book about an incredibly dislikeable man who looks down on pretty much everyone, especially if you have hobbies.

On top of the characters being shallow (both in personality and development) the plot is honestly boring. This book is described as a thriller, but the only suspense I ever felt was for the last chapter to finish. Ultimately, nothing happens storywise, I'd recommend skipping it.

side note: every woman is introduced with a description of her mouth, breasts, and hair, which is honestly a huge red flag for me when reading so I feel it's worth noting.

Gender garbage was hard, story still compelling

The bit where our dudebro goes to a library, rudely asks for a resource someone else was using, gets it and still thinks she was being "an incredible bitch" nearly made me put this down, but as long as you're willing to get past that and many other little things, the story was kind of fun.

Artificial sweetener when you expect sugar.

I read both of Grossman's Magician books, and I enjoyed and recommend those without reservation. There, he created interesting characters and your journey with them through an exciting story arcs gracefully from beginning to end.

In Codex however, the main story starts very slowly, after many minutes of defining the main character as an entitled, shallow, and barely likable guy. I developed a theory about halfway through that the author was following some sort of novelist's rulebook that contained requirements like "when describing a character's action (especially a love interest), always use exactly two adjectives; e.g. 'as she turned, her silky, raven hair fanned out in a sensuous, liquid arc before coming to rest on her slender, tanned shoulder.' " If there was a drinking game where you had to take a swig of beer every time that happened, you'd pass out by chapter 8.

The narrator's delivery is flat when reading plot, sometimes singsongy when reading descriptions (I think he noticed the author adhering to the above rule too), but very good when doing character voices.

Throughout the story I kept thinking things like 'this reminds me of Da Vinci Code' or 'this reminds me of a Neal Stephenson book.' I don't consider it a bad thing if that happens, and I kept thinking 'yeah, but I wonder where Grossman's going to go with that already proven idea...'

Unfortunately, it goes almost nowhere. I'm echoing other reviewers, but this book doesn't do much more than POINT to tasty plot potentials and only randomly does it seem to let us have so much as a bite.

The one area where we are served an unexpectedly rich treat was all the time spent describing the history of books. Had he spent more time taking us down those paths, and less time half-explaining the things that were supposedly propelling the plot and motivating the characters, I don't think I'd have felt the book so objectionable.

I haven't written many reviews, and I feel bad coming out strongly against what obviously took a ton of effort to create. This is the first time ( in many years as an avid Audible listener ) that I feel the difference between what I enjoyed and what I didn't like were so wildly out of balance.

What a disappointing ending...

What made the experience of listening to Codex the most enjoyable?

The mystery of it was fun. The end left a hollow feeling. I'm sure the author thought he was being clever when he ended it the way he did but when a book is finished I hope for a little closure.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Not really. I was able to set it down and pick it up.