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Good Reading : October 2017
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understanding of pickup lines, you can get away with a bit of “Hey, I think you’re unreal”, but if the first thing you’re saying to the woman or man that you’re trying to impress is ‘You strike me as very complex’, that’s only going to be a pickup line for some, isn’t it?’ I might warn my brother off that one. For a book about maths, there are more than a few myth-busting moments in The Number Games (including a factoid about how Darwin derived more of his evolutionary theory from mockingbirds than from his famous finches), and out of all the scholarly disciplines, maths perhaps is the most unforgiving of myths and untruths. ‘There is a certain truthiness to mathematics that I find very attractive in this age of fake news and make-your-own facts. As much as you want the number 51 to be prime, I’m sorry, dude, but it’s three lots of 17, and no amount of “I heard it on CNN” is gonna change that.’ Towards the end of my chat with the man who could solve a Rubik’s cube in under 40 seconds before he left high school – not to mention that he has an asteroid named after him – I have to ask: what is Adam Spencer really bad at? ‘I’m shit at chess,’ he says instantly. ‘Just before I came here I had a quick speed game of chess online, was in a potentially winning position and just made the most catastrophic error. If I could freeze time and spend a year doing something obsessively, I’d play chess. At my best I’m great, but the number of times I bring horror to the table ...’ I also learn that Adam has a passion for fiction; the day before, he’d taken a two-hour walk to his mum’s place while chewing through 80 pages of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader. His girlfriend is constantly chastising him for having a to-be-read pile that’s rapidly becoming a mini library. ‘If I do a book signing at a store, when I finish I try to be strong and head straight out the door – but I’ll look up and there’ll be one book with a really pretty cover, and 15 minutes later I’m leaving with nine books. It costs me 250 f***ing dollars to sign my own book,’ he says, ‘If I do enough I’ll be bankrupt. But I’ll bequeath a wonderful library.’ Perhaps Adam and I aren’t so different after all. The Number Games by Adam Spencer is published by Xoum, rrp $34.99. Released on 1 November, it can be pre-ordered now. COVER STORY GOODREADINGMAGAZINE.COM.AU GOOD READING OCTOBER 2017 18 ‘If I could freeze time and spend a year doing something obsessively, I’d play chess.’
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