Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Absolutely delightful.

Overall, I liked the book. It had a lot of really fun elements that were both realistic and fantastical. There were a couple times where you could tell “a dude wrote this” the way he described one of the female characters at times (for better or for worse), but that's easy to look over.

Fanciful and enjoyable.

DNF at 30%: I can't be bothered to enjoy something that brings up Google THIS much, and Clay is not an interesting enough character to make up for that in my books, I'm afraid.

A fun and engaging read, on books, relationships, technology, and a bit of magic. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Such a cool coded book mystery. I wish there were more to the series, tho i am looking forward to reading Penumbra's book.

Summary: When Clay Jannon takes the first job he can find after losing his old job to a recession, he has no idea what he is getting himself into. His new place of employment—Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore—seems at first to be little more than an oddly laid-out building with an eccentric owner, but as Clay continues to work there and to dig a little deeper into the goings on of the store, he starts to unravel a much larger mystery. This story delightful–the perfect combination of exciting and heartwarming.

2.5
I liked the first 60ish% and was entertained but the rest was such a slog to get through. So much unnecessary stuff/details in here that it dragged on and on - very lackluster end. I agree with Kat - “that's it? That's all?”

I started this book because City Lights has about 1000 copies of it.

I love any book about San Francisco. Even just when it's referenced or when it's the backdrop of stories.I love living here and I love the city so much that when it's loved by someone else, it just makes me happy.

That being said, I did not like this books that much. I like the general storyline of a weird book store that has that has a secret that the main character has to solve. San Francisco is a great place to have that story, so many of the homes are so old and creepy and beautiful. I think it's a perfect set up. That being said, they fell victim to the Silicon Valley mindset.

So much of this book was just talking about Google and raving about Google and I just really did not like that. The society was so old and beautiful, and I like that Google didn't solve it, but I didn't like how intertwined it was into the story. I like the hacker guy that I can't remember his name but other than that I did not love the “googlers” (that's what they got them in the book)

Overall, I'm glad I read it. It was fun and interesting and I liked how deep the world felt. I like the meaning at the end and I think it wrapped up pretty. That being said, I think it lost points on missing out on how beautiful and wonderful San Francisco is in a local sense rather than just being a home of silicon valley Idiots.

3.2

It Does Not Work That Way. None of it works that way! Not the technical stuff (the cryptography was particularly embarrassing). Nor the human-motivation stuff nor the relationships nor just anything. And it just kept annoying me more and more. There was one person to care about, maybe two, but even they were cardboard.

I’m betting this was written as a screenplay. Whiz-bang descriptions of computer animations and complicated artwork and stuff that has nothing to do with anything.

At a 4.5. This was such a good book. It had some very good Scott Pilgrim vibes and, obviously, had books and history. Which I love.

Pros: so fun, loved the characters, loved the puzzles.
Cons: poorly developed female characters.

A very sweet, enjoyable read.

three stars till the end. what the hell was that?

It's a crude definition (books > movies), but this felt like the National Treasure for bibliophile computer nerds. As both of these things (I picked this up partly because the protagonist was described as a web designer), it was delightful. There's a mysterious ancient bookstore set in the Silicon Valley startup scene, a cast of genius coders and designers, references to both a fictional fantasy series and game, a dash of wry humor, a secret society, lots of code, espionage, and a hacker thrown in for good measure.

The protagonist is a privileged millennial assumed to be navigating an economic crash. All the characters are likeable. It feels a bit like the “least successful” friend in an extremely successful group writing with awe about how brilliant everyone else is and feeling inadequate.

Starts off a tad slow but not for long.

An interesting premise as I love books, both print and e-book, but at times it felt like I was reading a big ad campaign for Google.
That said, it was a quick and interesting read with some humour sprinkled around.

I absolutely love this book! Sloan channels a Douglas Adams vibe that had me feeling nostalgic and comfortable from the offset, not to mention laughing my head off at times. Jannon is incredibly relatable and nearly all the characters are extremely lovable. I adored the equal love given to the old and the new, like books and e-readers. Mr. Penumbra's has become a fictional place that I would give a great deal to visit in real life.

This had a secret society, mystery, a generally likeable main character, and a side romance that i thought was cute, and it satisfied the part of me that craves romance lol

i loved sourdough so i was disappointed. this just made me feel like rushing through to get to the end :( totally can see the comparisons to ready player one. it started out really promising and fell flat as more characters were introduced and the puzzle became unveiled. the main love interest felt like it came out of nowhere and only for the convenience of driving the plot.

Cute and compact — the beginning was fun cuz it was literally 100 pages of “wait, what is going on? Why is?” Delighted as it went on. Brb googling the validity of fonts.

The premise in the first couple of chapters of this book were great, then Kat walked in and I remembered that I hate the way many cis male authors write women. Every scene that involved Kat talking about google or tech period, came with a creepy inner monologue from Clay. Talking about how pretty her ears were and cute she looked in her shirt. He fetishized her nerdy attributes and turned all of it sexual from the moment she appeared in the book. Her character, well all of the characters really, were just poorly fleshed out plot devices. I did find it funny that Kat had a dream of a disembodied digital sublime, when all it took was a pandemic to get us there. It seemed like the author lost steam while writing this book so the ending was anticlimactic and honestly a major let down. The second star I'm giving this book is solely for the one liners in the first 2 chapters.

I don't really read a whole lot of lighthearted, wholesome, easy flowing books. It's not that I prefer deep, reflective, contemplative books more, just that most of the time lighthearted books cause me to roll my eyes and get impatient. This book is another beast entirely, and it was an easy add to my favorites shelf for this year.

Without venturing into spoiler territory, the main character (Clay) takes a part time job at a 24-hour bookstore and meets Mr. Penumbra, the owner of the bookstore. Clay takes the overnight shift, and immediately starts meeting a strange cast of characters and set of rules he must abide by in his new position. Toss in liberal internal monologuing, a secret society, technology, visits to Google, obscure typography references to Geritszoon, and a wholesome message at the end, and this book managed to hit all the right notes for me.

It's not high literature, but I wasn't looking for high literature when I read it. This is a fun, geeky, quick read with a nice message that I really enjoyed. It's a charming book, not a lot of depth, but fun nonetheless. As a sidenote, I listened to the audiobook version of this and really appreciated the narrator's different voices, and the recorded bits from the audiobook the main character listened to near the end.

Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

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This is a sweet, winsome, gentle book that was a light and enjoyable read. It was also something of a shout-out to people like me who never get any recognition and barely recognize themselves as a group, viz, booklovers, bibliophiles.

I've always known, and never thought much about, my love for bookstores. When I travel to a different city, I will invariably end up in the local bookstore. The smell of bookstores always takes me back to an easier and happier time. For that matter, I practically raised my kids at Borders and Barnes & Noble.

That's why I enjoyed the protagonist's description of books and bookstores. We can tell that author Robin Sloan is a big-time nerd. (It's also why I can recognize Mr. Penumbra's bookstore as a thinly-disguised “City Lights Bookstore” in San Francisco, right down to the Condor Club (featuring Carol Doda, if you are old enough to remember, catty-corner across the street.)

Clay comes to Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore in search of a job. he gets the graveyard shift and starts noticing an odd clientele getting odd books. It becomes a mystery that Clay feels he has to solve. Along the way, he meets a cute nerdette and discovers the strangest secret society devoted to the weirdest secret ever described. There is moderate adventure and low-risk conflict. Clay presents as a typical urban fantasy nerd with the usual self-effacing humor, although this really is not a fantasy, but it could easily have been one, and a epic fantasy novel figures prominently in the solution.

Does Clay prevail?

Read the book. It's very nice and you will enjoy it.

I might recommend this as Young Adult, but for the fact that the relationship between Clay and his girlfriend is a “mature” relationship. Perhaps it would work for older YAs?

A better version of Ready Player One, in that, the author lacked the imagination to make this longer, his liberal use of deus ex machina enabled us to skip through what would undoubtedly be more wretched misrepresentations of modern tech life or even worse, manic pixie dream girl romance.

special edition ad hominem attack: the author's wife is an artisan olive oil miller.

2.5

2.5

I enjoyed the book. The main character was great. It would have been 5 stars wholeheartedly if not for the rather deflated climax/ending as well as the silly, shoe-horned romance with Kat.