Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos

I had high hopes for this and was disappointed. I think most of the reason for my lack of affinity is personal.
I'm a physicist and I love numbers - so I had kind of hoped that I'd see that love translate into an easy read of what Alex writes about. Unfortunately this book doesn't seem to have a destination in mind and most of the chapters feel like stand alone essays with little or no connection to each other.

Additionally, there are a number of 'conversation's Alex has in the book that go nowhere. The best example of unresolved exploration is occurs early in the book and revolves around a conversation with a numerologist.

I'm not even remotely convinced by the nonsense that is numerology BUT Bellos does little more than tell about the conversation. He doesn't explore what's behind the idea of numerology, why it's nonsense or even explore the more fascinating statistics about how numbers does impact our lives (whether it's the idea that people born in the years immediately following the post war era were bound to have opportunities to 'be' Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, or something akin to what the authors of Freakonomics look at). Instead he simply moves on to something else. It's quite frustrating because it's not informative and nor is it particularly entertaining.

Now, I found the maths itself tiresome - but that, as I open with, is personal, I'm numerate, and so the basic explanations were not what I was looking for.

Still, setting that aside I really wish this felt like an adventure. Sadly, most of the time, it felt more like a journey on a delayed train. It took far longer to get there than I'd have liked and the stations I passed through on the way had no more meaning than being names on boards where other people wait.