A gleeful and exhilarating tale of global conspiracy, complex code-breaking, high-tech data visualization, young love, rollicking adventure, and the secret to eternal life–mostly set in a hole-in-the-wall San Francisco bookstore The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a San Francisco Web-design drone–and serendipity, sheer curiosity, and the ability to climb a ladder … climb a ladder like a monkey has landed him a new gig working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. But after just a few days on the job, Clay begins to realize that this store is even more curious than the name suggests. There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly and never seem to actually buy anything, instead “checking out” impossibly obscure volumes from strange corners of the store, all according to some elaborate, long-standing arrangement with the gnomic Mr. Penumbra. The store must be a front for something larger, Clay concludes, and soon he’s embarked on a complex analysis of the customers’ behavior and roped his friends into helping to figure out just what’s going on. But once they bring their findings to Mr. Penumbra, it turns out the secrets extend far outside the walls of the bookstore.
With irresistible brio and dazzling intelligence, Robin Sloan has crafted a literary adventure story for the twenty-first century, evoking both the fairy-tale charm of Haruki Murakami and the enthusiastic novel-of-ideas wizardry of Neal Stephenson or a young Umberto Eco, but with a unique and feisty sensibility that’s rare to the world of literary fiction. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is exactly what it sounds like: an establishment you have to enter and will never want to leave, a modern-day cabinet of wonders ready to give a jolt of energy to every curious reader, no matter the time of day.
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Interesting. Kept me thinking. I recommend it.
I loved the book. It should be a movie.
Great imagination. Likeable characters.
Really loved this book! I highly recommend it!
I really enjoyed this book. What a wonderful surprise!
Great descriptive writing, and characters. Lots of fun, and a lot of original ideas.
Quirky and off beat but very entertaining mystery
It has a great plot but it is much too technical.
This is an unusual book. I stuck with it because it was so original, with fun, interesting characters. It might capture the attention of someone younger than my Baby Boomer crowd, someone who gets coding and a Silicon Valley vocabulary that’s only vaguely familiar to me. A good read
I liked the book until the very end and prologue. I don’t need every detail wrapped and tied with a ribbon.
I didn’t connect that much with the characters, but the book was original.
Robin Sloan is either crazy or a genius. What begins as an innocuous tale about an unemployed millennial taking the graveyard shift at a 24-hour bookstore, unfolds as a sort of “magical mystery tour” with bookstore clients coming in at all hours to check out books written in code. Why? To what end? The night clerk’s curiousity leads him to New …
This is the first book I’ve read in a very long time that I had trouble putting down. If I didn’t have to work, I would have read it in one day–it was that compelling. From the very first page, I was intrigued, and then the mystery inherent in the plot absorbed me. I tried to figure out what the bookstore was all about. The author provided …
Delightfully brainy
Charming
I’m half way through and I’m still sort of bored. I keep putting it down to read other books. Slow read
I thought it was fun.
The Club Dumas meets Google. Entertaining book store based mystery mixing Silicon Valley with rare books. Entertaining, intriguing with any violence death or bodily harm.
It started out in a promising way, but I lost interest half way through and didn’t finish it.
This is a very quirky, unusual books to read. The characters are delightful and it’s a sweet tale of old world meeting with the tech world.