Book Review: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

It was yet another day of substitute teaching work at one of our high schools when the secretary stopped me and told me that the author of this book was coming to school as part of the Silicon Valley Reads initiative. My interest was tweaked. A few years back, I had an opportunity to meet with another author (Willow Wilson, author of The Butterfly Mosque) at the same school. I finally ran to ground a teacher with a copy to spare and took it home.

That was my first "mis" take. By the time I got into my car, I had scanned the back cover and got an idea of what the book was about:

The Back cover read like this: The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon away from life as a San Francisco web-design drone and into the aisles of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. But after a few days on the job, Clay discovers that the store is more curious than either its name or its gnomic owner might suggest. The customers are few, and they never seem to buy anything- instead, they "check out" large, obscure volumes from strange corners of the store...

I was ready for a detective novel and given the recent propensity of my sons going gaga on Benedict Cumberbatch's version of Sherlock, I thought this book would be in line with A Curious Case of Coded Books or some such thing. I was right at one level. However, where my "mis" take on the book was in that it was much more than just a "Curious Case".

I found it to be intriguingly a chronicle of our times. When Dickens wrote his works, it resulted in social reforms in his times. When Bradbury wrote his Fahrenheit 451, it encapsulated the angst of the post WW2 West and felt doomsday at his doorstep. Sloan's oeuvre is definitive of the highly digital, technical age we inhabit and interact with, in novel social ways. There is this virtual party where Clay has an online date and he skypes in and gets introduced around via his live screen stream to all the others present in real time in another part of town. We, who have "walked" around with our laptops showing the latest remodeling in our homes to faraway family or sharing a birthday party or marriage via skype or vimeo can totally connect with this.

The book behooves us to ask ourselves if all the access to information that we now have can be tamed to find solutions to our lives. Google is a character in this book as much as Mr. Penumbra. The data mining that happens within split seconds of inputing a few chosen words in the rectangle on the google search page is a miracle of our times. It is so much easier to write a research paper today than ever before, not having to search through dusty libraries for an obsolete reference. Everything can be done sitting in front of your laptop or walking around with your smart phone. 

My second "mis" take was that I decided to start reading the book before I had made dinner. Hence hubby dear had to make dinner and cursed the book. I tried "hiding" the book in a dark corner and blast it, I discovered that the darn cover "glowed" in the dark revealing itself and my amateurish attempts at hiding it.

As I scanned through the pages, I had this eerie feeling that I had already read this book because in so many instances, it felt like conversations between me, my husband and our friends who work in the Silicon Valley, were recorded by Robin Sloan and transcribed on these pages. It is not uncommon for "geekspeek" in this highly technical region nor a highly intellectual debate on Organic farming or the future of the Arts in an increasingly integrated espace. The byline under the author's photo on the first page explains this: "...and now splits his time between San Francisco and the Internet".

As I remarked to the author, at one time in the book, where Clay is close to cracking the code, I was reminded of the katapayadi system in India where alphabets were given numerical value. The entire Melakarta system in carnatic music uses this as an effective mnemonic device to recall all 72 Melakarta names. I wondered if he knew about it before writing the book and he said he would certainly look into it for future use.

The final "mis" take was the author's meet. I thought we would discuss the book, the plot, but it was more about how the current situation in publishing has completely bouleversed the entire institution of big publishing. Today, anyone can write anything and get it published in book form. I have a friend who has written this book about Mothers and daughters and if not for this amazing ability offered by modern technology such narratives will never see the light of day. They will wither away in the dark corners of our brains, never shared or downloaded into the collective minds of our contemporaries.

An easy and quick read and certainly a 21st century upgrade on what book plots will involve and how they will evolve as we move deeper into that phase of human existence which is so intertwined with the digital world.