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

I am not a very religious person, but oddly, I owe my love of libraries to the Catholic Church. In eighth grade, when preparing for my Confirmation, I was pretty irritated to find that St. Francis of Assisi was requiring us to complete a community service project. It wasn't enough that they had stolen the best hours of a Sunday, but now they want me to volunteer for something? And for at least 20 hours? In eighth grade time, 20 hours is basically unimaginable, and as far as I was concerned, it was equal to a life sentence.

Photo Credit: The Morning Call

My parents were most in favor of volunteering somewhere that was close to home (they're smarter than they look) and shortly after I was given a volunteer badge at the Parkland Community Library. The gig was essentially all about re-shelving books that people had returned, and you got to push a squeaky gray cart with one broken wheel around so that you didn't have to make too many trips. I was a charming 12 or 13 years old, and I figured  knew the library pretty well, since I had read them out of Nancy Drew books a few years earlier. But soon I was amazed by all the things that I had the books that I had missed (who knew that authors other than Carolyn Keene existed?!), and every time I went to shelve a book, I managed to find one right next to it that I just had to read.

I'm sure I did more reading than shelving, but luckily, the 6-9 pm shift on Wednesday nights wasn't too wild and the staff didn't seem to mind. I specialized in ignoring my homework to concentrate on things that I actually wanted to read, like Natalie Babbit's Tuck Everlasting, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time,  and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and it ended up serving me well, as had already read most of the assigned high school literature by the time I made it to ninth grade. Because I had made so many library friends, formatting bibliographies was no sweat, and the reference librarian was happy to help me find sources that actually backed up the crap that I claimed in the papers that I was forced to write. At this point, I had completed the required community service, but just kept coming back because I loved the smell, I loved the quiet, and they started letting me empty the book drop.

I feel that the most coveted job at any library (compared to the least favorite job of shelving adult non-fiction), is emptying the book drop. In fact, I used to even try to show up early so that I could prevent anyone else from getting there first. I found that if you growled at the people that were dropping off their books, there was less than a 25% chance that someone would call to complain later, however, chances were higher if the person depositing the books was a little kid who started shrieking.

What you're looking for.

I stopped volunteering regularly at the library in 2005 when I went off to college, but all of these wonderful memories came back when I recently read Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. I was expecting very little from this book- I had just broken my ankle and was desperate for basically anything decent to read, and I picked it up while browsing The Moravian Book Shop (which is also the world's oldest continually operating bookstore) in Bethlehem. It was an enchanting novel, about a recently laid off Silicon Valley employee who finds employment in 24-Hour Bookstore with odd owners and mysterious clientele. He is endearingly awkward, and teams up with a Google programmer and his entrepreneurial best friend from eighth grade to help his mentor solve a puzzle that cannot be deciphered by a secret society.

I am very picky about the books that I like, and prefer intelligent science fiction that yields some mystery, delivers a clear underlying message, and finishes very cleanly (with all ends tied up) on a positive note. This book expertly meets all of these criteria, and through a very relatable narrator that keeps the reader engaged, Sloan establishes common ground between the digital world and the importance of literary preservation. For the first time in a very long time, I felt like I was reading a tale that hadn't previously been told, and one that managed to balance my own feelings about my love for a dusty library built in 1981 with my love for technology.

Please consider picking up Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, whether it's online, in your local bookstore, or your local library. Let me know what you think-
I'm hoping it will dazzle you too!