I had never heard of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore until my roommate recommended it to me, and I’d never heard of its author, Robin Sloan. But I decided to give it a shot, and I have to say: This book is awesome!
Written at the crossroads of centuries-old secret orders and cutting edge web services, Penumbra’s is funny, exciting, gripping, and totally off-the-wall. It follows the story of Clay Jannon after he’s laid off by a San Francisco startup. He finds a new job working at a strange, old bookstore for the equally strange and old Mr. Penumbra. Soon he gets wrapped up in the store’s mysteries, using data visualization to solve a secret puzzle and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to crack a centuries-old encrypted book.
As someone who works in the tech field in San Francisco, I have to say that this is almost tailored to me. Penumbra’s is full of tongue-in-cheek jokes about “the Google brass band practicing an algorithmically generated waltz,” or a startup getting bespoke company t-shirts that fit perfectly, or just the incredibly unpredictable weather of SF. It’s written with the same humorous voice of John Dies at the End, but it feels like a crazy mashup of Snow Crash and So You Want to be a Wizard (old-school young adult novel that I read in probably 1997). The last one is even alluded to a couple times.
I’ve often wondered what it would be like to read a book that was set in modern times, but written like a science-fiction book. You know, it’s not a cellphone, it’s a “Mobile Communicator, a piece of black glass that glows with an otherworldly light.” Well Sloan has written the same thing from the other direction. This is a modern story written like a fantasy novel. Programmers aren’t just coders, they’re wizards – casting spells through their computers to solve ancient puzzles and track down missing artifacts. There’s even an in-universe fantasy book series and a Dungeons and Dragons knock-off that the characters reference with occasional funny phrases like “the warm glow of the daystar.”
At the prose level, this book is well written. Sloan is a careful writer with a good ear for clever, alliterating phrases like “bankrupt burger chains and shuttered sushi empires.” The book breezes by, and you could probably finish its 304 pages in a couple afternoons in the park.
Penumbra’s is definitely a weird book. It combines a lot of themes that don’t normally collide and makes them work. It’s funny, it tickles the curiosity, and it’s well paced and written in an engaging, self aware voice. I highly, highly recommend this book.
See the full list of books that I’ve read for this project here.
Leave a Reply