Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Robin Sloan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 305 pages (October 2, 2012)
Kindle Edition $8.99, Amazon Hardcover $17.64, Amazon Paperback $9.97

Images from times I look back upon with nostalgia are a sure way to get me hooked on a new novel. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore had two of those at the outset. There was the image of ladders on rails along the walls of a bookstore. And there was the description of an ancient Mac used to manage customer accounts in the store. The first took me back to my days at B. Dalton Bookseller in the mid and late 1970’s and early 1980’s. The second reminded me of our local used book store in Mountain View in the late 1990’s.

Those images sucked me in, but the plot and the writing kept me engaged.

The narrator is a graphic designer in San Francisco who found himself unemployed when his startup went bust. He finds a job in a strange used bookstore which turns out to be a front for a secret society. That society, we learn later, is engaged in trying to untangle a code left by one of the pioneers from the early days of the printing press and typeface design. We also get a picture of the culture inside Google, down the peninsula in that same Mountain View where my used bookstore was. Google culture, as the author sees it, is every bit as much a cult as is the secret society at the bookstore.

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore says a lot about our values and priorities. It was entertaining and thought-provoking. What more can one ask of a novel?

Why I Read

Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books
Wendy Lesser
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (January 7, 2014), 239 pages
Kindle Edition $10.67, Amazon Hardcover $18.63

I have seen several mentions of this book since it was first published. I read an almost loving review, which I believe was in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Most recently I heard Wendy Lesser interviewed on Forum on KQED radio. The conversation was fascinating, but perhaps that was to be expected since Forum host Michael Krasny is a professor of English at San Francisco State. In any case, I had trouble focusing on the work I was supposed to be doing since I wanted to give my full attention to the interview. It was that interview which prompted me to finally pick up Why I Read as my next book.

The book was enjoyable enough, but I realized that I would rather hear Lesser talk to a sharp interviewer than read her on the printed page (or Kindle iPad app screen, as the case may be). That said, the book was still well worth my time. As some of the Amazon reviews suggested, the book has a conversational style. And I’d much rather that than be preached at, certainly.

Lesser’s chapters have titles like “Character and Plot,” “Novelty,” and “Grandeur and Intimacy.” She covers a lot of territory. In one chapter she moves from Cervantes to Shakespeare and Chaucer to Swift and on to Mailer and Capote and their “nonfiction novels,” as she calls that genre.

One nice thing about Lesser is that she makes no pretensions about offering up any sort of canon, à la Harold Bloom. She does, however, provide a list of “A Hundred Books to Read for Pleasure,” ordered alphabetically and without comment.

In the end, I’m glad I read the book. Lesser had some interesting comments about mystery novels and books in translation, to mention just two topics.

And that KQED interview is here, if you’re interested.