Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
This book has a great title.
The cover also glowed, which was cool.
The plot seemed like an interesting one, all breakneck pace and secret societies and books. I had seen this book and its title for so long and thought, “Oh man, this is going to be right up my alley.”
But it wasn’t. It really wasn’t.
The narrator, a dopey web designer in his early thirties? Late twenties? I can’t remember, if it was mentioned at all. Anyway, he’s a smarmy, fairly thick character. He, himself, does little, and exists largely to spit out little bon mots with very little bon in the mot. I feel like his sarcasm is unearned — I never saw anything spectacular in this laid-off web designer to make his ironic descriptions of “the mustachioed master of the secret library”** seem like he’d earned the right.
The conversations he has with his girlfriend from Google (and her slavish, freakish dedication to making the Top 100* who decide Google’s future direction) are painfully dull and make out the geeks to be some sort of uber-cult, capable of finding the hidden structure, the hidden meaning to Life, itself. That the plot revolves around Google and Amazon and their magical devices and computing power unraveling this great mystery doesn’t help make it any more exciting. When the narrative devolves into a parallel of a Dungeons & Dragons session I very nearly put the book down and just gave up. But I kept hope that his great reveal at the end would make it all worth it… but, at the same time, felt that it was going to be really tough to re-lift the Hindenburg of a novel.
This is the second-ish book of this sort I’ve read (Austin Grossman’s awful “You” was another and Rolf Potts, the author of the travelogue “Marco Polo Didn’t Go There” is a similar sort of character) where I’ve just found the narrator insufferable. I’m trying to put my finger on it, but it’s slippery. They seem to be entitled, fatuous, but they think, and perhaps their authors think, that they’re actually quite clever. But you know what? I don’t want to figure it out any more, because I don’t want to waste any more time thinking or reading about these characters.
* Special Note: I’m getting a few facts wrong, here. They’re nearly right. I could have gone back and looked them up again, but I really can’t, the thought of re-entering this book frankly bores me and I don’t want to annoy myself again by slogging through it to find the facts.
** Oh God, see? I went back and looked up that passage, had it earmarked, and the book’s annoyed me all over again. Ugh.