Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

A Novel

By: Robin Sloan

Narrated by: Ari Fliakos

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 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 21st 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 listener, no matter the time of day.

©2012 Robin Sloan (P)2012 Macmillan Audio

Delightful

What made the experience of listening to Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore the most enjoyable?

A mystery was set up, the process was engaging and the ending was as it should be.

What did you like best about this story?

The main characters were well fleshed out and likeable.

What about Ari Fliakos’s performance did you like?

It was appropriate - not too gaudy.

If you could rename Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, what would you call it?

Why rename it?

Any additional comments?

Recommend this. If you want fast action you will be disappointed but if you want to be intelligently entertained this is for you.

Beautiful

This was probably the most beautiful writing I’ve ever heard. The story was hilarious and witty, and the amount of different characters as really enjoyable.
Even though I don’t know coding or a lot of scientific it still kept me interested. This also might be because I studied design and understood all the design terms.
This story honestly makes me feel like I want to work in a mysterious book story that leads me to an adventure.

Delightful. Narrator is perfect for the character.

Microserfs meets Kaiju Preservation Society meets Cryptonomicon meets … I don’t know, whichever whodunnit you like the most.

This book sits so perfectly in the centre of the Venn diagram of my overlapping interests (old bookshops with gold lettering on the window, early-Google-phase computer nerds, fantasy trilogies with dragons and magic, historical artefacts and endless fascinating details) that it feels like it was written specifically for me. But maybe it was also written specifically for you.

I can’t comment about the story much without spoilers, but the main character/narrator is engaging and human, the other characters are fun and not cardboard cutouts, the driving forces are at once believable, sometimes funny and sometimes more profound.

The voice narrator does a stellar job. Particularly when Clay (the protagonist) is sneaking into the (redacted). I am going to seek out other books he’s narrated.

Satisfying conclusion.

I honestly don’t know where I’d shelve this book in my hypothetical bookstore. It would appeal to fantasy readers but it’s not technically fantasy (there’s no magic). It would appeal to readers who like Douglas Adams, early Neal Stephenson, but it’s not sci fi, despite using some science and a lot of engineering (it’s set in the present day ish, 2017 ish, and uses tech available then). It’s got a central mystery but it’s not solving a crime. I’d have to hand-sell it.

A Book for Book Lovers

I love books. In fact, I love books so much that I picked up Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore purely because I liked the idea of an actual 24-hour book store so much!

And boy am I glad I did.

Mr Penumbra’s is a love letter to all bibliophiles. It’s for anyone who ever dreamed of finding a real-life mystery in the pages of a book or wished they could go gather a party of their equally geeky friends and embark on an epic quest.

But for all its fantasy origins, Mr Penumbra’s is grounded in modern day San Francisco on the forefront of the digital age. Technology and leather-bound tomes intersect for a fascinating look at the modern mythology of Google.

Audiobooks are often treated as the ugly step-child of literary world so I think fellow audible.com users will especially appreciate the musings about the future of the written world in an increasingly virtual world.

Mr Penumbra’s has transcended genre-preferences amongst my circle of friends so I highly recommend it to readers everywhere!

Disappoinyig

Did not enjoy this book at all despite a fabulous narrator. Did not understand the computer language or the Si fi references. Did not find it amusing.