Ambrosia (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
missroserose) wrote2013-05-14 11:18 pm
missroserose) wrote2013-05-14 11:18 pm
Book review: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
What a delightful little tale! I can't for the life of me remember where I first stumbled across it, but I'm glad I picked it up. It might as well have been custom-written for someone of my age and tastes: someone who loves technology and is excited about what it can do for us, but still loves books and their history. Toss in a dash of a heist adventure, a vaguely sinister secret society, some history of print and of human information exchange in general, a couple of visits to the Google campus, and just maybe the secret to eternal life, and we have a thoroughly entertaining and unconventional mystery adventure.
In several ways, it entertained me how obviously this was a book written by a Millennial. Count down the points: the main character is a recent college graduate staring down the maw of the Great Recession and uncertain as to his abilities (and, therefore, his identity); his friends include a special effects artist, a former-nerd now-successful-entrepreneur, and a hyper-smart girl who's into data visualization like nobody's business; the overarching themes include valuing old knowledge while still adapting to fit the times, and treating people well because our friends and allies are our greatest resource; while the story toys with the idea of an evil organization (whose funding, naturally, comes from charging egregious licensing fees and tracking down e-book pirates so the publishers can slap them with egregious lawsuits - two Millennial bogeymen if I've ever seen them), ultimately it contains good people within it, and even the guy in charge comes off as less evil than misguided and power-hungry. And, of course, the ever-present optimism about the future and the awesome things it could (and perhaps will!) hold - Kat's favorite thought experiment is called "Maximum Happy Imagination", fer chrissakes. Maybe it's just that I've been reading a lot of stuff about how sociologists classify my generation lately, but it practically reads as a checklist of our core values and hopes. If I were just a little more cynical I'd think Mr. Sloan had made use of such a checklist in hopes of appealing to my/our age group. (Maybe he did. Making use of newly-discovered information is a major theme, too.)
As much as I enjoyed the story, I had a few nitpicks - Clay's world could have used a little more fleshing out, and I wouldn't have minded seeing another major female character (if the story passes the Bechdel test, it's only by the skin of its teeth). More fundamentally, while the secret-society story is entertaining, it ends up being mostly a MacGuffin for the character development, and consequently the stakes never really feel that high. Still, there's nothing wrong with a trivial-but-engaging story about people you might like to meet someday. So if you read the above list and said "Awesome!", consider this a strong recommendation. A-
In several ways, it entertained me how obviously this was a book written by a Millennial. Count down the points: the main character is a recent college graduate staring down the maw of the Great Recession and uncertain as to his abilities (and, therefore, his identity); his friends include a special effects artist, a former-nerd now-successful-entrepreneur, and a hyper-smart girl who's into data visualization like nobody's business; the overarching themes include valuing old knowledge while still adapting to fit the times, and treating people well because our friends and allies are our greatest resource; while the story toys with the idea of an evil organization (whose funding, naturally, comes from charging egregious licensing fees and tracking down e-book pirates so the publishers can slap them with egregious lawsuits - two Millennial bogeymen if I've ever seen them), ultimately it contains good people within it, and even the guy in charge comes off as less evil than misguided and power-hungry. And, of course, the ever-present optimism about the future and the awesome things it could (and perhaps will!) hold - Kat's favorite thought experiment is called "Maximum Happy Imagination", fer chrissakes. Maybe it's just that I've been reading a lot of stuff about how sociologists classify my generation lately, but it practically reads as a checklist of our core values and hopes. If I were just a little more cynical I'd think Mr. Sloan had made use of such a checklist in hopes of appealing to my/our age group. (Maybe he did. Making use of newly-discovered information is a major theme, too.)
As much as I enjoyed the story, I had a few nitpicks - Clay's world could have used a little more fleshing out, and I wouldn't have minded seeing another major female character (if the story passes the Bechdel test, it's only by the skin of its teeth). More fundamentally, while the secret-society story is entertaining, it ends up being mostly a MacGuffin for the character development, and consequently the stakes never really feel that high. Still, there's nothing wrong with a trivial-but-engaging story about people you might like to meet someday. So if you read the above list and said "Awesome!", consider this a strong recommendation. A-