Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Featured Book
Antiquarian books meet Google in a race to crack a centuries-old code.
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is just the kind of novel you’d expect to come out of San Francisco: a story that combines the bibliophile’s love of a nice, hefty book with the astonishing technology for which the city has become known. Down-on-his-luck web wizard Clay Jannon takes a job at the titular bookstore which, he soon learns, is a front for a library that lends tomes filled with mysterious strings of numbers. Monks have been at work for ages to crack the code in these books, but Clay has a better idea: enlist his tech-savvy friends and let high-powered computers do the math.
Sloan turns this engaging plot into a debate about digital vs. analog, as well as an inquiry into just what our computer-addict brains consider real and virtual these days. Part of the fun of Sloan’s book is how he translates real-world tech phenomena into Penumbra-esque equivalents (Google, for instance, is here run by randomly selected managers who feed their employees via an algorithm). At its heart, the book is full of deadly serious questions about where our technology is taking us and loads of sharp observations about tech culture. One could quibble with the novel’s too-tidy ending and occasional linguistic lapses, but there are more than enough nerdy pleasures to compensate in this thought-provoking, frequently delightful debut. And listening to the audiobook — which allows you to combine the warmth of Ari Fliakos’s bouncy narration with the latest mobile audio technology — is arguably the most appropriate way to experience it.
