Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
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 bookstoreThe Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a San...
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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 bookstoreThe 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 twenty-first 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 reader, no matter the time of day.
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Format: hardcover
ISBN:
9780374214913 (0374214913)
ASIN: 374214913
Publish date: 2012-10-02
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pages no: 304
Edition language: English
The most delightful book I've read in a long time. That's partly because so much of it just clicked with my interests - books, fonts, Google and the digitization of the world, the Ruby programming language, and mysteries. It was the humor that made it particularly fun, though. If you like Terry Pra...
Clay Jannon, newly unemployed, stumbles upon a mysterious bookshop during his frequent wanderings through the streets of San Francisco. The Help Wanted sign in the window seems like a sign of fate and he feels drawn into the bizarrely shaped store filled primarily with antique one-of-a-kind texts. ...
I loved this book! It starts slow with Clay explaining how he got to Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore but when he decides there is a mystery about it and it's decided lack of customers it picks up. As I followed Clay and his friends around as they try to unravel the mystery of the bookstore and Mr. ...
Even though I am a book lover, novels that are supposed to pay homage to books never quite do it for me. There is just something to "fangirl/fanboy" about it all -- and in this book it was especially bad because the author also spent the majority of the book gushing over Google and tech culture. I w...
In Robin Sloan’s Roman „Die sonderbare Buchhandlung des Mr. Penumbra“ geht es wie man sich bei dem Titel bereits denken kann um Bücher, aber auch um Buchliebhaber eine Buchhandlung und eine geheime Gesellschaft, die, man kann es kaum glauben auch mit Büchern zu tun hat. Es gibt eine kleine Geschic...