Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

A love letter to both books and technology and the dichotomy between them

Charming, very well-written modern-day fable featuring books, mysteries, technology, codes & Google.

A bibliographic quest involving a mysterious book store, a black-cloaked secret society and a fellowship of modern day adventurers. Ancient texts and classic typefaces collide with Google, Hadoop and Mechanical Turks.

Clay Jannon is an art school grad and out of work dot-commer desperate for work. Spying a Help Wanted sign he agrees to be the night clerk for a dark and narrow 24-hour bookstore. It's main clientele turns out to be an eccentric cadre of readers who borrow cryptic books filled with indecipherable text.

From there we tumble down the rabbit hole of an ancient bibliographic cult attempting to solve a centuries old secret. Clay gathers his merry band that brings together a Russian programming prodigy, boob physics startup CEO, Googler and data visualization whiz, a knitting collective, ILM whiz kid, book hacker/pirate and some octogenarian acolytes. More olde school fun.

Festina Lente!

I had a really fun time reading this book and pretty much raced through it. It reminds me a lot of a Scarlett Thomas novel, although it doesn‰ЫЄt embrace actual magical things or more difficult-to-grasp concepts like she often does, and it was written to be more accessible (e.g. than The End of Mr. Y) and less explain-y (e.g. than PopCo). But it had a similar upbeat, optimistic, friendly, fun, engaging tone – brightly coloured and clearly delineated, if you can say such a thing about a novel. It loves old things and it loves new things and wants you to love it all too.

The book‰ЫЄs final message, or what I took to be its final message, was disappointing – have friends, make connections, and take advantage of them to help you solve mysteries and save the world. It‰ЫЄs a cute message but so much – I don‰ЫЄt know, smaller, less significant than it was building up to be? I mean, maybe it‰ЫЄs a revelation of truth for some people, and it worked with the quest structure of the story, but it didn‰ЫЄt work for me. It‰ЫЄs such a common thing in popular culture to find a family in your friends and whatever but I don‰ЫЄt know, I feel kind of weird in a world that suggests all your friends must be smart and talented and able to contribute toward your personal goals in life, like they‰ЫЄre some sort of curated collection of beings. Which is all I‰ЫЄm going to say about that because I know there are people who actually don‰ЫЄt have family and so friends truly are everything to them, and obviously you can pick your friends but not your family and there are some truly horrible people out there who are someone‰ЫЄs family, and seriously, bless them. So yeah.

And it was really weird to read about a cute, quirky, smart woman named Kat who lives in San Francisco because that describes my sister-in-law perfectly! Very weird.

I really enjoyed this book. Just a warning though: If your not a tech geek, there's going to be a lot in here that you won't understand.

Part of the joy of a good story is the characters. In many ways, it might be said that the point of a good story is the characters themselves: how they hold up against the challenges slung at them by the plot; how they celebrate their triumphs and mourn their losses. It is also very much about who they are: are they funny and clever, dark and brooding, or perhaps a little bit of everything, with a touch of crazy in between? Oftentimes, it is the most complex characters that have the greatest impact, the ones that linger readers' memories: like Tyrion Lannister, from A Song of Ice and Fire, or Morgaine from Mists of Avalon. Neither of these characters might be considered purely good, nor purely evil: they simply are.

It is this complexity of character that makes them very interesting storytellers. Much of Mists of Avalon is narrated by Morgaine from a first person point-of-view, and it's fascinating to see how her training as a Priestess of the Goddess, her relationships with the other characters, and her understanding of the world influence the way she tells the story. Tyrion is the same: his background and his understanding of the world all play a part in how he tells the story. While it's true they're not the most reliable of narrators, it is this very unreliability that makes them interesting storytellers.

Sometimes, though, there are narrators who tell a story, but don't seem to make the same impact as Tyrion and Morgaine do. They are almost colorless, relating events and talking about characters as they appear, with no input of their own. There is some fun to such characters, of course, but for the most part it's obvious they're nothing more than a vehicle for the story itself. “Like the bread dipped in cheese fondue,” as Hope put it when I commented on the “narrative shell” that is the lead character and narrator of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is the story of Clay Jannon, who gets laid off from his job during the American economic dip in 2008-2009, and winds up working as the night clerk in a quaint 24-hour bookstore owned by a mysterious gentleman named Mr. Penumbra. Although Clay finds the idea of a 24-hour bookstore a little odd, especially given the advent and growing popularity of electronic readers, he finds that he's happy to work at the bookstore - especially when he starts interacting with the regulars: an odd bunch of people who order books from what he's dubbed “the Waybacklist.” As he begins to look further into the activities and mysteries of the Waybacklist and of the bookstore itself, Clay stumbles upon a deeper mystery that may lead to him unlocking an immense secret that's been kept hidden for hundreds of years.

It's easy to see the appeal of this book: the title alone is enough to draw the attention of any avid reader, and the blurb at the back is capable of raising curiosity in anyone who happens to pick it up off the shelf. And as one dives into the first few chapters, Clay himself draws the reader in: his turn of phrase seems to indicate a wit that promises much snickering and amusement throughout the book. Unfortunately, wit is not indicative of character in this case, because Clay turns out to be quite unremarkable and colorless. He is, in fact, so colorless that he is borderline boring, and only the characters around him and the plot save the reader from dropping into a nap in the middle of the book. It's hard to say if this was deliberate, or Sloan simply has difficulty writing an interesting narrator - likely the latter, because the people around Clay are precisely the kind of people one would love to have around oneself.

In fact, it is these supporting characters that manage to save Clay from utter ignominy - and reader frustration. Take his roommates, Ashley and Mat, for instance. Mat is an artist with Industrial Light and Magic, while Ashley is a rock-climbing enthusiast and PR agent. And then there's Kat Potente, Googler, seeker of immortality, and Clay's love interest - though it's rather hard to see what she sees in Clay, given how boring he appears to be. There's also his best friend Neel Shah, a computer genius who owns a company dedicated solely to the accurate digital replication of boobs for video games and movies. His friendship with Clay is built on a grade-school love of a fantasy novel series and table-top RPGs - the stuff that all the best friendships are made of.

And then there are the people at the bookshop: Mr. Penumbra himself is quite fascinating, especially towards the middle and latter portions of the book. The day clerk, Oliver Grone, has a special place in my heart because he “daydreams about Ionian columns,” and “[doesn't] mess with anything newer than the twelfth century.” And then there are the bookstore's regular, but more mysterious, clients: the excitable Tyndall; the stuttering but sweet Lapin; and Fedorov of the thick Eastern European accent. It is these mysterious clients that eventually lure Clay into investigating what he calls the “Waybacklist” - and to uncover what's really going on with his employer, their regulars, and the bookshop as a whole.

Speaking of investigation, the other thing that saves this novel from being a complete bore is the plot. It starts out somewhat slow, but by the middle portion - incidentally, just when Clay starts to get utterly uninteresting - it really picks up as it takes the reader on a quest (this is literally what Clay and Neel call it) from San Francisco to New York, from the bookshop to the hidden library deep in the bowels of the headquarters of the Broken Spine, and then to the gleaming architecture of Google's complex. The chase is exciting - exciting enough that Hope and I decided to blast through the last third of the book instead of sticking to our two-chapter-a-day quota for our read-along. As the pursuit gets more intense, the plot spirals up and up to reach a spectacular climax, before sliding out into a denouement and epilogue that some readers may find a mite saccharine, but which is, undeniably, satisfying and enjoyable. I personally find the use of the future tense for the Epilogue to be interesting and fun, a nice twist on the traditional epilogue most readers encounter in other books.

A word of warning, though, who walk into this and expect complexity a la Neal Stephenson, particularly in the parts involving codes: such complexity is not to be found here. Even when the novel begins talking about cryptography and code-breaking, it never once goes into anything in-depth. Even the code-breaking done at Google is glossed over; not even Kat explains what's going on.

Overall, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is an entertaining and engaging read: the plot is pretty well-paced, with a good payoff at the end, and the supporting characters are a joy to read. The plot itself might not have the same amount of puzzle-solving as other, similar arcane mysteries (The Rule of Four, for instance, or The Name of the Rose), but is entertaining nevertheless, tying in the past, present, and possible future of books, reading, bookstores, and libraries. The narrator/protagonist might not be so interesting, but that simply leaves the reader free to slide into the story and go on a ride with the other, far more fascinating people surrounding the poor, colorless narrator. And if this novel is anything, it is that: a fun ride with a tidy, satisfying ending.

it's like microserfs and the davinci code had a baby, and that baby grew up playing on reddit and reading the oatmeal and smbc cartoons, and got a useless art degree.

generally speaking, the story is nice and fun with just enough “wink wink but really though” sage advice to give it substance. it does flag somewhere in the middle, not entirely sure why. i think it makes the mystery so compelling from the very start that it has difficulty sustaining it while other parts of the story develop. but it does pick up and deliver a pretty satisfying reveal.

if you meet 3 or more of the following criteria, you will enjoy this book:

-you can identify 5 or more fonts by name
-use a mac
-are interested in art and DIY
-read wired pretty regularly
-aspire to live the lives portrayed in the social network.

I was too old for this book. Plus that much Google love has to be unhealthy. But it was sweet and my 14 year old loved it.

The best way to describe it is as some sort of cross between a Dan Brown novel and a techno thriller with a snarky narrator and a D&D analog named “Rockets and Warlocks” tossed in for flavor. As interesting as this may sound, my reaction to it was a more or less resounding “meh”.

This book is about a down and out web designer named Clay who's last chance at putting supper on the table is a job at an odd book store that he just happens to pass by. Of course the book store turns out to be more than what it seems. Its actually a front for a secret society of what amounts to code breakers, and Clay brings all his technology whiz buddies to bear in cracking the centuries old code that consumes the lives of the code breakers.

I really wanted to like this book, and one interesting thing about it was the way it brought together elements of an old fashioned, mystical, secret society with the technology of google, and the internet age in general. And the plot pacing was pretty good, good enough to keep me reading through the end anyway. However . . .

In the beginning the prose alternated from being readable to being really clunky. Most of this was smoothed out by the beginning of the second though. I wasn't kidding when I said the book was sort of like a Dan Brown novel. I'm not going to give the end away, but if you have read either Angels and Demons or The DaVinci Code its not hard to guess the gist of the ending of Mr. Penumbra. I guess there is more I could say about the characters, and especially what seemed to me to be the contrived (and painful) use of a fictional fantasy series as a necessary piece of the plot, but I think I'm going to stop there.

In summary, it wasn't a great read, but if there is a dearth of reading material this will keep you entertained for a while.

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