Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore; A Novel by Robin Sloan

Quick overview: This is a story about a guy named Clay who finds himself working at a strange bookstore. This of course means that strange things are happening there. Very odd people come and borrow the books in the back which are filled with nonsense letters, but are really a puzzle to solve. Clay unwittingly solves the puzzle in the books with help from a friend who works at Google using computers.
 
 After Clay’s boss, Mr. Penumbra finds out he did this, he reveals the store is part of a secret 500-year-old society, the Unbroken Spine. Mr. Penumbra is convinced that using computers they can solve the ultimate puzzle of the society, an encrypted book written by one of the very first book printers. This book contains the secret to immortality. Clay secretly scans this book which is literally held chained to a secret room, and sends it off to Google to be decoded.

 The only problem is that even with the might of Google, the puzzle isn’t solved. But after finding the original typeface punches that were used to print the puzzle book, Clay realizes they have the code to break the puzzle on them. So they are then able to solve the puzzle, and life is great.

My thoughts: This book is told in first person in a stream of consciousness. This means that even when Clay the main character speaks, it’s him thinking about what he said, not “I said…” I actually really enjoyed this method of writing. It felt fresh and different from the normal first person point of view. Plus it helped that the character was rather witty, so it was enjoyable to have the story be told in this way. I did enjoy all of the characters, but the main character didn’t seem to have quite enough curiosity for me. I mean, he works at a book store during the night shift alone with tons of free time where strange people pop in to borrow books that have some kind of a secret code in them, and he isn’t even interested enough to open a book to look at it on his own. He kind of just accidently finds himself solving everything by a bit of luck and chance. That said, he was still an enjoyable character.
 
  One of the aspects that I liked about this book is that is stayed very much in our realm of reality, even with the discovery of a 500-year-old secret society trying to solve an encrypted book to find the secret to immortal life. When I realized that immortality was the goal of many of the characters in the book, I didn’t want that to be the great revealed mystery. It just didn’t feel like that would be a satisfactory ending. Most likely because finding the secret to immortality, to me, feels unrealistic. It would have taken the book to a weird fantasy world that is not felt in the rest of the book.
  So I was very pleased that when the master book was finally encoded, it turned out to be just the original printer’s very detailed and honest life story. He had included all the dirty details of being a business man. The printer just didn’t want to have his story be public at the time of his death, because it would damage the reputation of his shop he was handing down to his son. It was just a misunderstanding of why the book was encrypted that caused people to believe it contained so much more. This, I felt, was a satisfactory ending.

Overall I really enjoyed this book, and would recommend it to anyone.