Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

If I had known what this book was like going into it, I probably wouldn’t have read, ha. So I’m glad I knew so little, because I really enjoyed it! Even though it’s about a conspiracy, a secret society, a giant puzzle to be solved by breaking a hidden code. It’s funny and quirky and weird, but also gets a tad nostalgic and tongue-in-cheek at the end. I loved it that the solution to the puzzle was something so simple and overlooked because everyone was expecting something far more complicated. I laughed out loud at how everything finally connected in the end. And of course I loved all the bookish references, especially (oddly enough) to a fictional fantasy series (which reminded me of the fictional series everyone loved in the Magicians books).

It starts out being about a guy in San Francisco out of a job, who picks up a night shift at a small bookstore. Almost immediately he notices something odd about this bookstore: most of the (very few) patrons don’t actually buy books. They borrow hefty tomes written in some kind of code, accessible only because they have membership in some private group. Our protagonist’s employer warns him to never look in the coded books in the back part of the store, or he’ll be fired instantly. But of course he is curious and when a friend eggs him on, he takes a look. And gets sucked into attempting to break the code. Which actually looks possible, because he doesn’t just throw old decrypting methods at the problem, but amasses all the scary powers of modern technology and computer brains, to crack the puzzle in just the blink of an eye (compared to the decades the secret club has been working on it). And what he finds- on practically the very last page- is a total surprise, which really made me laugh. All those people worked up over the wrong thing!

I really liked how this book meshed old knowledge and craftsmanship ways of doing things, with the blazingly fast and frighteningly powerful new powers of programming and crowdsourcing. It shows the best of both worlds, and also -perhaps- how they could mesh into something even better. There’s so much love of knowledge and things bookish in here- from how things are organized, to the vast storage spaces of museum collections, to the beauty of typefaces and the mastery of writing code. Not to mention all the odd people, and the coming together of great minds, and friends. It was great, and it all went by in a flash. There’s a prequel too, which piques my interest, though my library doesn’t have a copy of that, so I’ll have to look for it elsewhere. And of course, I loved the end message, that things written in books which are treasured and handed down from one generation to the next, are the real immortality.

Oh, also- the Google parts were weird. And I thought: maybe that’s just how the Google workplace is. But I gather from some other reviewers that it’s decidedly not. Doesn’t bother me, but it might bother people in the know.

Borrowed from the public library.