Codex

By: Lev Grossman

Narrated by: Jeff Harding

Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

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)

Video Games as Real Life

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes, I loved Codex. I was reading (listening to) a New York Times member one bestseller with a sexy twist when I began reading Codex. I couldn’t stop listening to Codex until I had finished it. It moved along right from the first page. It sucked me into the story and kept me there. I highly recommend.

What did you like best about this story?

I liked the way that it kept moving forward without wondering off on needless side trips.

Which scene was your favorite?

My favorite scene was when Margaret began assembling the Codex.

By far the worst book i've ever read

What would have made Codex better?

The plot is unbelievably slow and the writing is very bland. Almost anything would have made it better.

ignore reviews

Just try it! ignore all of the reviews. Its well written. And narration is really good.

This really is the worst book.

I’ve read an average of 200 books a year since 2010. A lot of those are psychological thrillers/mysteries, a few are Lev Grossman’s other works. I cannot believe that in all those books I’ve finally discovered the Worst Book Ever Written. The sloppiness! The unapologetic incel-esque misogyny! The completely random and off topic video game interludes that take up way too much time and completely distract from and confuse the storyline. It’s a masterpiece of wrongdoing. I’m just astonished at how genuinely bad it is. Congrats!

Hoped for more and ended pointless

I kept hoping this was going somewhere and it ended flat. All the detail and pointless reading.

Brilliant entry for Grossman's "Magicians" series

A marvelous fantasy novel that seems realistic on the surface, about a young banker caught up in a search for a lost coded book as well as caught in a deeply mysterious advanced computer game in a world that he supposes is utterly normal, but the reader can see has suddenly ceased to be normal at all.

Amazon readers of the codex or ebook version of "Codex" seem as conflicted as readers of Joe Hill's "The Heart-Shaped Box," with alternate reviewers praising it or harshing it. To me, this reaction always presages a valuable reading experience: something different here, with a lot of meat on the bones.

It took reading it twice and finally listening to it before I finally "got" the whole point, and it was important to have read Grossman's brilliant Magician books in the meantime. The world of Codex only seems like ours on the surface if you resolutely deny all the inconsistencies: it's really the world of magic Grossman writes about more openly in later books. The coincidences are too impossible, the computer game is far too visually clear and the path it takes much too creepy to be separate from the main action. The Artiste looks like a gnome......that is probably because he IS one. Our hero never guesses the world isn't the normal banker's world he thinks it is, and that is perhaps the point of the book: that we can deny and deny most of what we live with, and thus fool ourselves completely.

The reading is good and the book is easier to understand read aloud, at least that was my experience. "Codex" is well worth a listen.

Amazing! I finished wanting a sequel!!

Lev Grossman has such a superb vocabulary! I enjoy everything written by him! The history written into a character driven story kept me fascinated the through the whole book!

DON'T BOTHER!

Would you try another book from Lev Grossman and/or Jeff Harding?

This book was long and tedious. I kept expecting that it would get better, but in the end you are left confused and very unsatisfied. This book was a total waste of time and money.

Has Codex turned you off from other books in this genre?

most definitely.

What character would you cut from Codex?

All of them.

Terribly Boring Story in Search of a Point

This story meandered along in search of a point. I now have no curiosity about the author's other works. The narrator has a natural dramatic reading style which includes a wide variation in the volume of his voice. This may be great for someone who listens at home or with ear phones/ear buds. As a driving listener this is frustrating for me because the narrator's voice was regularly drowned out by the sound of the vehicles around me on the freeway. I finished it in the hope that it would have a surprise twist that would FINALLY cause the tale to make sense...no such luck. I would ask Audible to take it back but I am pretty sure they would not want thus stinker back!!

Don't Waste Your Time!

The only positive thing about the book is the narration. The story is plodding, unexciting, uneventful, pointless.....I could go on, but you get the idea. A complete waste of my time. I hung in there until the end thinking something had to happen to make the torture of the listening experience worth it. I was wrong.