Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
So here’s another book about books. Not a bad thing, not at all, as I love books about books. Lately, thanks to the internet and all those Amazonian algorithms, I’ve been reading more and more books about books—each one leads me to another. I’m sure there’s some deep seated spirituality that can be gleaned from this kind of thing. So even if, in the end, Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore isn’t, actually, about books, that it’s considered to be about books will nevertheless leads me to other books that are.
Do you follow me? No? No matter. This was a fun read anyway. I read it one day, more or less, a feat that requires free time (I was on vacation) a decent writing style (Robin Sloan’s sentence crafting is fine) and a compelling plot (it’s a book about a puzzle). I’ve seen other reviews compare Penumbra’s to The Da Vinci Code, The Shadow of the Wind, and The Name of the Rose. (Let me add Ready Player One to that list). I’ll agree to those comparisons with a grain of salt, like I said above, in as much as it means people will be led to this book and others of the same ilk if we allow the comparison.
Because in the end, there’s not much of a puzzle at Mr. Penumbra’s, more of a mystery, which is fine. I do like how Sloan uses the internet as a thing and the internet as a theme to sort of modernize a philosophy of what it means to be creative. I liked the allusion to Erasmus, and even though it was a bit one-dimensional, I liked the earnestness of the characters.
There were a few things along the way that were not handled well—pretty much everything the book mentioned about Google was just silly, especially the big brute-force puzzle-solving fiasco near the end. (Spoiler alert—they fail to break the code, but I can tell you from even my limited knowledge of puzzlecraft that, actually, a brute-force approach would have worked, given the actual final solution). Major flaw? Sure, if this was just a book about a puzzle. But if you let the book be more about other themes, about the human condition, how people are the real resource of interconnectedness, I suppose such flaws can be overlooked.
I overlooked them for The Da Vinci Code and Ready Player One, and Penumbra’s better written than those, in my opinion.