Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

You know, I'm really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is a fun little read: part mystery/part adventure/part social commentary/part comedy, it seeks to examine the relative merits of new and old technologies and determine which holds the keys to immortality. It can be compared to everything from The Da Vinci Code to The Hobbit– without pretending to the seriousness of either – and having decided to just turn my brain off, I went with the flow and totally enjoyed the ride.

What's the opposite of chick lit? This isn't “lad lit” (which is apparently reserved for books about young men who are desperately seeking Ms. Right) and I can't find a decent definition of “bloke lit”, but whatever it's called, this is definitely the male version of chick lit: light and chatty and told in the voice of a likeable young man; like Bridget Jones' little brother. Clay Jannon is a twenty-something graphic designer who, finding himself unemployed, stumbles into a job as the night clerk at the title book store. He soon notices that there's something mysterious about what he calls the “Waybacklist” (ancient looking books that are borrowed by a small group of aging eccentrics), and using his knowledge of coding, data visualization, and distributed computing, Clay accidentally solves the Founder's Puzzle and is granted entry into a secret society; the Unbroken Spine. The mystery/adventure that follows pits the society – and their 500 years of careful reading – against Clay's access to modern technology, and while some plot twists might strain belief (or, conversely, reduce tension by making things look too easy or convenient), this central idea of books vs computers was consistently interesting.

Like I said, this is guy lit (is that a thing?) There are female characters, but they're stock types: the love interest is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl-type (super cute and works at Google); Clay's roommate is a perfect example of womanhood (too bad she's an android); and the one old woman who borrows from the Waybacklist is a flustered, hand-flapping, tea-offering ditz (but she does smoke weed – hey, this is San Francisco). But that's all okay, because this story is about the guys, who might also be described as lacking dimension, and the reason why I'm looking for the right term to describe it is because this is a guy's book, but without the  machismo of sex or explosions or killer albino monks; dude lit? This is a book where the main character still calls his best friend by his childhood Rockets and Warlocks name when he wants to coerce him into joining his quest. A book where this best friend has made his fortune – as a middleware designer – by perfecting digital boob simulation. And the fact that Clay always refers to it as “boob” simulation kind of perfectly tells you who he is: inoffensive and a bit immature. He makes jokes like: If this sounds impressive to you, you’re over thirty and Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone. This could almost be a YA novel but I don't know if it would have mass appeal to teens – even with Harry Potter-like cloaks and chambers and moving furniture. But again, I liked it.

I liked that author Robin Sloan introduced me to real life technologies like Hadoop and Mechanical Turk (and made me wish that I had a task that required the attention of thousands of Estonians). I liked that the secret society could be traced back to an actual figure like Aldus Manutius (but was sorely disappointed to see that I don't have a Garret Zoon font on any of my devices). I liked that he incorporated the plot line of his own fantasy creation, The Dragon-Song Chronicles. I actually appreciate that Sloan's brief prequel to Penumbra is a "kindle single", only available digitally (even if it means I'll likely never read it). Most especially, I liked the persistent sense of logic: Every plot point followed naturally upon what happened before, and while that might not make for high literature, it was comfort food for me while it lasted. In the end:

After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this: 

A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

Perhaps I found this book at exactly the right time, and there's no doubt it will fade from my mind, but it was just what I needed and I'm happy to have gone along on the journey. I'd give this 3.5 stars if I could but a rounding down will have to do.

And, because I listened to an audiobook of Penumbra, I liked this quote, too:

I've never listened to an audiobook before, and I have to say it's a totally different experience. When you read a book, the story definitely takes place in your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes.

That's it, isn't it? Listening -- injecting the story directly into your brain -- somehow moves the story outside of the reader's head. Sometimes I feel like I'm still just getting used to listening to audiobooks, but so long as Libby and I can keep walking for an hour + every day, I suppose I'll keep listening.

While listening, I was for some reason reminded of my mother-in-law's story about when computers were first installed in the London Life office when she worked there. First of all, she took that job on the advice of her mother: The cafeteria offered a hot lunch every day for a quarter, so Bev's Mom urged her to take advantage of that (as Bev was to be living away from home for the first time). The London Life was an exciting office to work in, even though Bev was in the secretarial pool. It had modern advances like pneumatic tubes!

And before Bev left her job (forced to quit before her pregnancy with Dave began to show), she was witness to the installation of an enormous Univac system -- a computer so large that an outer wall had to be removed and a crane used to lift it into place. Bev said that there was a lot of work for the secretarial pool in transferring information onto key punch cards for the new computer, and in the summertime especially, all the secretaries hoped to be sent to the computer room -- as it was the only air conditioned area in the building.

In the spirit of Penumbra, it's really fascinating to me that my mother-in-law -- someone who was witness to the early frontiers of computer science -- totally rejects new technology. She's a constant reader, but when my father-in-law gave her a kindle for Christmas one year, she said, "No thanks." Bev has never even turned on their home computer and vehemently resists being shown anything about it. Interesting; she'd make a good candidate for the Unbroken Spine.

I will also admit that I was a bit crestfallen while listening to this story. I more or less accidentally followed up the online creative writing class I was taking with something much more advanced. Within the first couple of weeks of Write Fiction Like a Pro, we were expected to outline the plot of a novel. As I had had something kicking around in my head forever, I started working out elements according to the instructor's formula, and the more I really thought about my idea, the more I started to get excited about it. With this structure I was learning, I began to believe that I might actually be able to write a novel. But as I listened to Penumbra, there were some elements that echoed my own ideas (about where immortality lies), and while that might explain why I was intrigued by Sloan's treatment of books vs computers, it made me feel like I had been plotting a story about fascist talking animals and then stumbled upon Animal Farm. (Not quite that extreme, but...) 

On the other hand, no matter how my unoriginality makes me feel, I just might write my book anyway. The codex vitae of the Unbroken Spine members -- the stories of their lives, preserved for future seekers -- is essentially what I'm doing here, and as I marvelled at how many of the memories I've detailed on this blog could be easily grafted onto the spine of my plot, I suppose I was subconsciously composing my own codex vitae all along. As for my mother-in-law and her own shunning of the immortality afforded in cyberspace, in a small way, this can be her codex vitae, too.