Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore

Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore ~ Robin Sloan

Clay Jannon is a recently laid-off web designer in 2012 San Francisco. As with so many of us, as his job search goes on, his criteria gets less and less fussy, until he finds himself working the overnight shift at a 24-Hour bookstore in the part of North Beach that is known for strip clubs. Business is practically non-existent, and those clients that do come in tend to be very odd and also they don’t buy things, they borrow, and it tends to be the same books borrowed by different clients. What’s going on? Clay knows enough coding to create a program that finds a pattern, which leads to a mystery he would like to solve. There is a love interest in a young coder named Kat who works at Google, his best friend is a millionaire who wrote a program about realistic graphic representations of boobs, and the owner of the bookstore never seems to worry about the fact that they don’t carry the kind of books that people might actually buy and read.

This book was fine. There was some surprisingly low stakes cloak and dagger secret society stuff that takes our crew to New York for a bit. There was a mention of an underground food court at a local mall that used to be pretty good, but that mall now stands empty, a victim of the pandemic and online shopping, which is when I realized the book was written in 2012. There’s a lot of Google worship that was off-putting, but perhaps more of its time than now. I wouldn’t recommend this book per se, but I wouldn’t warn someone off of it either. It was entertaining enough and kept my interest. It got good reviews and was nominated for Goodreads ‘readers favorite fiction’ in 2012. Your mileage my vary.