Clay is the newest hire at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, occupying the clerk’s desk through the midnight hours and trying not to go out of his mind with boredom. He is there not because he has a passion for books, but because the bagel company he once managed ads and the website for has folded, and he’s out of job. The bookstore is a strange place: it stocks the books Mr. Penumbra thinks should be available to the public, not necessarily books the public wants to buy. There’s no shortage of ancient Greek plays, for instance, but popular biographies are nowhere to be found. Stranger still, the “bookstore” has a special section that works more as a lending library to a small clique of eccentrics, people who come in in the middle of the night a-quivering with anticipation and insist they need (insert arcane-sounding title here). And the books themselves are indecipherable, at least to Clay: they’re in some kind of code. Having nothing else to do during these long nights, Clay begins creating a digital model of the library with color-coded paths to represent each of the people in the strange club, trying to figure out if there’s meaning in the books they choose. Startlingly, a pattern emerges. After hooking up with a data-viz engineer from Google and uploading past circulation data to its servers, the pattern becomes even more obvious, and opens the door to Clay learning about, of all things, a cult of book-readers devoted to decrypting a tome by a late-medieval font designer. This was an odd, if enjoyable enough story. The initial premise is certainly a good hook, but once Clay starts digging in and realizing what it’s all about, the potential magic-realism element evaporates and we realize, yeah, these people are just nutty. An unexpected enjoyable element for me was the Google nostalgia: this was written and published back when Google was still “cool”: think The Internship-level Google worship. These days, of course, Google is a bit more like Sauron and his All-Seeing Eye, but as someone who grew up with Google and misses those days of optimism, it was kinda nice to revisit them.
Kat’s eyes light up: “A natural language corpus! I’ve been looking for an excuse to use the book scanner.” She grins and slaps the table. “Bring it to Google. We have a machine for this. You have to bring it to Google.” She’s bouncing in her seat a little, and her lips make a pretty shape when she says the word corpus.
I sense an incompatibility between Kat’s belief in a disembodied human future and her insistence on alcohol consumption, but I let it slide, because I’m going to a party.
“You have Gerritszoon,” I cluck, “suitable for emails, book reports, and résumés. This”—I point to the blown-up NARRATIO on my laptop screen—“is Gerritszoon Display, suitable for billboards, magazine spreads, and, apparently, occult book covers. See, it has pointier serifs.” Mat nods gravely. “The serifs are pointy indeed.”
“Besides,” I say, “I’m the rogue in this scenario.” Kat raises an eyebrow and I explain quietly, “He’s the warrior, you’re the wizard, I’m the rogue. This conversation never happened.”
“We’re going to take a picture of every surface, from every angle, under bright, even light.” He pauses. “So we can re-create it.” My mouth hangs open. He continues, “I’ve done photo recon on castles and mansions. This store is tiny. It’ll only take three or four thousand shots.” Mat’s intention is completely over-the-top, obsessive, and maybe impossible. In other words: it’s perfect for this place. “So, where’s the camera?” I ask.
Reading Freely 
At last, a book that I have read and found enjoyable, even though it was eleven years ago. I will quote the end of my review, which was more favorable to the book, perhaps in part because Google was still “cool,” as you put it, when I read the book in 2014.
“This is an entertaining book that will appeal to both fantasy lovers and those who like mysteries. With its focus on the latest internet technology, the story presents an interesting analogy between the printing revolution begun by Gutenberg and the digital revolution in books as it is being promoted by Google and other internet behemoths.”
It’s funny, but despite my suspicion of Google these days, I’m still on board with its mission of making information accessible — I use Google Books ALL THE TIME to search indexes of books when working on research requests.
I remember the fanboying around this book when it came. I never saw a bad word about it, just praise. Which is probably why I avoided it 🙂
I added it to my KU library and never got around to reading it until last week, when I needed some lighter fare.
I see that its the first book in a trilogy… Sounds… Interesting… [muses]
Oh…. and COMPLETELY off-topic…. Check out Zandi Holup on YouTube. I think you’ll like her – maybe…. Sure sounds like Dolly… [grin]
Ooh, nice sound! I listened to a couple of hers on my lunch break and will be trying more tonight after I’m home. Thanks!
She just randomly popped up on my YouTube feed. As you say *nice* sound!
I think I’ve seen her name once on a playlist, but at the moment my youtube is stuck in a lofi jazz/citypop hole because I enjoy listening to those while playing The Sims 2 / 4. EA re-released The Sims 2 as a Windows 11-friendly Legacy edition and I’ve rediscovered how addictive it was!
Oh, I’m a BIG fan of lo-fi when I’m just browsing and want something chill in the background late @ night.
Mostly these days YouTube gives me political stuff and Warhammer 40k lore vids… [lol]
I’ve been trying to push it to give me male book-tubers and have found 2-3 who I like.
OK so that sounds absolutely fantastic! A book about books and magical realism sounds like it was written for me
Well, it had the FEEL that it would be magical realism, but that goes away the more the reader gets into the novel. Still fun, though!
I enjoyed this one a lot, but that was many years ago
Did you explore it as a series? I must confess I’m not hugely attracted….
series? There’s only 1 book – plus a 65 page novella that supposed to come before this one. I haven’t read it
Cyberkitten mentioned it appeared to be part of a trilogy, but I didn’t look into it myself.
Hmm, it doesn’t seem to be. He started that book as a 20 page short story, so maybe that’s what the reader had in mind.
I have also read Sourdough by the same author, not as good – and not related
Penumbraverse
0.5. Ajax Penumbra 1969 (2013)
The Suitcase Clone (2022)
Moonbound (2024)
That’s like Matrix-level sequel pacing!
Yes, 0.5. Ajax Penumbra 1969 is the 65 pages novella.
The others seem only very loosely connected, they don’t even show as part of the series on goodreads.
Nor on the author’s website, for instance he doesn’t make the connection between Penumbra and Moonbound: https://www.robinsloan.com/moonbound/