The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets - Simon Singh

I just finished this audio book today, and a few things come to mind about it. First, I think, given the opportunity to go back in time, knowing what I know now, I would have preferred reading this as opposed to the audio version. There are a couple reasons for this. First, some of the dialogue where the narrator would read a large string of numbers, could be easily skimmed over if read, but the audio version was quite mind numbing to listen to read out as a whole. And speaking of mind numbing experience, that brings us to the next reason that the book would have been better read than listened to: The narrator was dead boring!

They say that if you have to explain the joke, then it's not funny. Well imagine an entire book that is dedicated to explaining jokes; and not just jokes, but jokes that involve nerdy math humour! If you want to make a book like this interesting, you have to make the writing evocative and witty; emphasis on the witty. I mean this is a book about humour after all. And don't get me wrong, the book actually contains a great deal of humour within it. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the narrator either doesn't understand the concept of humour, or recorded the audio after reading the book for the millionth time. I mean, how difficult is it to make a book about The Simpsons interesting? It's The Simpsons! They're funny!

That being said, the actual content of this book was absolutely amazballs! It delves into the incredibly deep and nerdy humour of many of the Simpson's writers; virtually all of whom appear to be math savants...math savants who can make anything funny...including math! Now you might be thinking to yourself: How interesting can this book be? It's about math! But I really learned a lot about concepts they never really delved into in school. Concepts such as Mersenne primes, Euler’s equation, vampire primes,narcissistic numbers, infinity with subsets of infinity that are larger than infinity! What??? Finding out how these concepts work, actually had me proclaim "COOL" out loud many times, and I'm not a guy who was ever good in math! But the way these concepts were explained really help illustrate just how interesting math can be, and by extension, how funny and nerdy The Simpsons really are.

I am only giving this book a 4 star rating, but the reason for that is the lousy narration. Now, if you like DVD extras and interviews from the creators/writers/producers of The Simpsons, then you will love this book.