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Codex
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
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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.
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- By: Dan Fesperman
- Narrated by: Dan Fesperman
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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West Berlin, 1979. Helen Abell oversees the CIA's network of safe houses, rare havens for field agents and case officers amidst the dangerous milieu of a city in the grips of the Cold War. Helen's world is upended when, during her routine inspection of an agency property, she overhears a meeting between two unfamiliar people speaking a coded language that hints at shadowy realities far beyond her comprehension. Before the day is out, she witnesses a second unauthorized encounter, one that will place her in the sight lines of the most ruthless and powerful man at the agency.
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Fiction from Truth
- By Sue MB on 11-10-18
By: Dan Fesperman
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The Cleaner
- By: Elisabeth Herrmann
- Narrated by: Imogen Church
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Pools of blood, scenes of carnage, signs of agonising death - who deals with the aftermath of violence once the bodies have been taken away? Judith Kepler has seen it all. She is a crime-scene specialist. She turns crime scenes back into habitable spaces. She is a cleaner. It is at the home of a woman who has been brutally murdered that she is suddenly confronted with her own past. The murder victim knew Judith's secret: as a child Judith was sent to an orphanage under mysterious circumstances - parentage unknown.
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Reader was very distracting
- By Merry Unbirthday on 10-16-17
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Black & White
- By: Dani Shapiro
- Narrated by: Marguerite Gavin
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling herself away from her famous mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits she took of her young daughter from the ages of three to 14. As Clara charts a path connecting her childhood with her adult life, Shapiro's novel weaves together past and present in images as stark and intense as the photographs that tore the Dunnes apart.
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It was okay
- By Lucy7 on 02-13-19
By: Dani Shapiro
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The Ghost Writer
- A Novel
- By: Robert Harris
- Narrated by: Roger Rees
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Adam Lang has been Britain’s longest serving—and most controversial—prime minister of the last half century. As pressure mounts for Lang to complete this memoirs, he hires a professional ghostwriter to finish the book. As he sets to work, the ghostwriter discovers many more secrets than Lang intends to reveal, secrets with the power to alter world politics - secrets with the power to kill.
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Too close to the truth?
- By carl801 on 11-24-07
By: Robert Harris
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How Like a God
- By: Brenda W. Clough
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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What would it be like, to get absolute power? Would you wear a cape and fight crime? Rule the planet? Or perhaps you would be like Rob Lewis, and watch your world collapse around you. Does absolute power corrupt absolutely? Rob is going to find out.
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At one point the main character rapes at 13 year old girl
- By Richard Davis on 05-29-21
By: Brenda W. Clough
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Laguna Heat
- By: T. Jefferson Parker
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Laguna: a place where a crazed killer has turned paradise into a Disneyland of depraved violence - with a fiery vengeance - and where homicide cop Tom Shephard unravels a grisly mystery. It reaches back across 40 years of sordid sex, blackmail, and suicide into the dark corners of his own past.
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Fabulous
- By Stacy on 02-24-09
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Blood Music
- By: Greg Bear
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Vergil's innovative experiment restructuring the cells of a common virus becomes a nightmare when, in order to save his research, Vergil injects the entire culture into his bloodstream.
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THOUGHT UNIVERSE
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 08-01-15
By: Greg Bear
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Pattern Recognition
- By: William Gibson
- Narrated by: Shelly Frasier
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Cayce Pollard is a new kind of prophet - a world-renowned "coolhunter" who predicts the hottest trends. While in London to evaluate the redesign of a famous corporate logo, she's offered a different assignment: find the creator of the obscure, enigmatic video clips being uploaded to the Internet - footage that is generating massive underground buzz worldwide.
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Only gets better with age
- By Mika on 12-14-18
By: William Gibson
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The Flicker Men
- A Novel
- By: Ted Kosmatka
- Narrated by: Keith Szarabajka
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
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A quantum physicist shocks the world with a startling experiment, igniting a struggle between science and theology, free will and fate, and antagonizing forces not known to exist. Eric Argus is a washout. His prodigious early work clouded his reputation and strained his sanity. But an old friend gives him another chance, an opportunity to step back into the light.
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Started out good but fell flat
- By Ed A on 08-04-15
By: Ted Kosmatka
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The Medusa Amulet
- By: Robert Masello
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 15 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Benvenuto Cellini, master artisan of Renaissance Italy, once crafted a beautiful amulet prized for its unimaginable power - and untold menace. Now the quest to recover this legendary artifact depends upon one man: David Franco, a brilliant but skeptical young scholar at Chicago's world-renowned Newberry Library.
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A great historical fiction book, fun and intriguing
- By Nicole on 04-14-16
By: Robert Masello
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City of Dark Magic
- A Novel
- By: Magnus Flyte
- Narrated by: Natalie Gold
- Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Once a city of enormous wealth and culture, Prague was home to emperors, alchemists, astronomers, and, as it’s whispered, hell portals. When music student Sarah Weston lands a summer job at Prague Castle cataloging Beethoven’s manuscripts, she has no idea how dangerous her life is about to become. Prague is a threshold, Sarah is warned, and it is steeped in blood. Soon after Sarah arrives, strange things begin to happen.
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So promising and yet...
- By Tyler on 01-19-13
By: Magnus Flyte
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What listeners say about Codex
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Diane
- 02-22-12
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.
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6 people found this helpful
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- C.
- 05-18-16
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.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Tom Sellers
- 01-23-15
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!
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- Virginia
- 06-13-19
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.
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- Woo! Woo!
- 09-15-12
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.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Amit
- 01-20-21
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
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- Aubrey Jean Scott
- 01-02-23
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.
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- Daniel Miles
- 04-16-17
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.
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- Thomas
- 11-16-12
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.
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19 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Watercolourist
- 10-12-16
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.
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