Book Crush : Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

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Are you interest in different subjects such as technology, design, typography, visualisation, relationships, love and, above all, bibliomania ? Can you imagine when they comes together into a swiftly paced story that’s part literature, part thriller?

Yup, this is the book that you have looking for. Thanks God I had experience Sloan’s skill in weaving together. As a woman how grew up in programming enviroment, I really impressed by the references data visualisation, the Ruby programming language or Google’s technological might, it’s relevant to the plot development. You believe Sloan knows what he’s talking about. For other authors, such technological or cultural references might sound contrived. In this novel, they fit.

The story begin when Clay Jannon, a young man in San Francisco adept at the interwebs, who is out of work and takes the night shift working at an odd bookshop and he found several things that were odd:
  • The shop’s shelves are huge towering structures reaching up several storeys.
  • There are very, very few customers; what customers there are, ask for books with strange code-like titles and are feverishly devoted to one particular series.
  • Penumbra, the owner and manager, seems indifferent to selling books.
  • Penumbra asks Jannon to record details about all the customers in a dusty old ledger – what book they asked for, the time of day, appearance and the clothes they wore.
After some uneventful shifts, Jannon’s curiosity takes over and he starts exploring the shop, its books and the customer ledgers. It’s like pulling on a loose thread. The more Jannon explores, and his ideas form, more ideas unravel and the bookshop becomes stranger.

I will not spoiler many thing that surprised you!! You have to  give this book a try. Mistery is definitely one of the reasons why I enjoyed the novel so much. I’m interested in technology, design and literature too. When someone melds these topics into a good mystery novel, I’m very happy! and this book definitely a book that you want to read twice or more.