This audiobook of essays is unique in that it includes snippets of music from rare collections of jazz to Berlin punk, which are critical to the narrative. There are sound bytes of interviews woven in, which lends the production a sort of radio journalism quality.

Kunzru has a very engaging way of telling stories about unusual and captivating personalities, from Mme Blavatsky, the globe-trotting, fortune-reading creator of Theosophy, to Orlan, the French performance artist who presented to audiences live plastic surgery being done on her face. The narrator’s boundless curiosity, emanating from his voice, makes the discovery of each portrait feel intimate and immediate.

“In my twenties, I was depressed, and so I began studying philosophy” - one chapter begins. The author’s humorous observations about the state of philosophy in the Academy, the holy war between its Continental and Analytical strands — and to escape it all, the exciting early 2000’s underworld of the cyber-futurist / theoretical-humanistic punk hackerspace conferences of poetic cybernetic post-feminisms — that drunken island of lost lovers of philosophy, that brilliant mess.

It evoked such a feeling of nostalgia…the intellectual meanderings of my twenties, which little by little, led me away from the humanities and cyberfeminism, and deeper into computer science. It was the political implications of a free internet, and the punk poetics of cryptoparties where PGP keys were exchanged — that was the stuff that made the internet fun and interesting, that led me to want to build things with code.

The author captures a slice of that euphoria of ideas and art in his essays.

His abundant love of music, of sound, of the history of the technology of sound, of the precise technical qualities of MP3 compression, of the invisible engineering labor behind the simplicity of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” — all of that is communicated by the author in such a delightful way, which is enhanced by this audio form of storytelling.

The author presents his identity as an British-South Asian, mixed child of colonizer and colonized, and immigrant to Brooklyn. This lens of navigating the in-between serves as a guiding theme for these essays, which sit somewhere between the personal and the political, a monograph and a podcast, the historic and the futuristic. All in all, a beautiful achievement.