From the Bookshelf of Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge…

Clay Jannon is an unemployed web designer, looking for a new job. He finds himself drifting somewhat aimlessly through San Francisco, missing his days as web guru for “NewBagel,” which produced some sort of engineered perfect breakfast food. Obviously once the recession hit, people cared less about whether or n

Clay Jannon is an unemployed web designer, looking for a new job. He finds himself drifting somewhat aimlessly through San Francisco, missing his days as web guru for “NewBagel,” which produced some sort of engineered perfect breakfast food. Obviously once the recession hit, people cared less about whether or not their bagels were perfectly circular, and NewBagel quickly folded. He finds a sign in the window of the mysterious Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and soon ends up the new night clerk. As described, the bookstore sounds amazing (hence its place on my “I want to go to there” shelf). It’s full of floor to ceiling bookshelves, holding all kinds of crazy sounding titles, most of which Clay determines are the only volumes of their kind (he can’t resist doing some title-Googling). The customers are few and far between, and all of them are...more than a little odd. Clay soon finds himself scaling the teetering ladders to retrieve the old, dusty, nonsensical looking volumes. He also must record each customer’s visit in a logbook -- their appearance, their mood, even the weather that day.

It doesn’t take Clay long to wonder about the story behind these people -- are they a club? A cult? Something even weirder? Despite his employer’s admonitions not to read the books on the back shelves (the more “commercial” stuff is up front, for actual sale), Clay quickly gives in to curiosity. What he finds, however, is even stranger -- the books all seem to be written in code, with no clues to the key. Given that many of the borrowers seem anxious to get their hands on their next volume, Clay wonders what, exactly, is to be gained from cracking the codes.

Since Penumbra’s doesn’t have a lot of traffic in the form of paying customers, Clay attempts to put his web skills to good use -- designing a fancy website, sending out coupons via Twitter... it doesn’t really work, but it does bring along Google girl Kat Potente, a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl cut from the Zooey Deschenel cloth. Here’s the thing about that -- I don’t really have a problem with Zooey Deschenel. I loved her in Elf, and the few episodes of New Girl I’ve watched were entertaining. I’m just not a fan of the trope, on screen or page. You know the type; the girl who’s just SO adorable and quirky that you can hardly stand it. Kat, for instance, always wears a red t-shirt that says “Bam!” She probably plays the ukulele in her spare time too. But Clay, of course, immediately falls for her and enlists her help in cracking the code of the books. Since she works for Google, Kat just loves codes and puzzles. I have to wonder if the glimpses we’re given of the inside of Google headquarters are accurate or imagined. It sounds pretty nifty, especially if you’re a techno-geek. Kat’s coworkers also raise some interesting questions about how far we’re willing to go in our quest for knowledge. From what we see of it in the book, it would seem that Google’s M.O. is to record all information everywhere in the world. Including what exists in people’s minds, which is pretty freaky. There’s also mention of a side project called Google Forever, which is apparently studying the possibility of immortality (what form this will take is up for debate). Kat quickly catches Clay’s obsession, and lets him use a few of Google’s fancier toys to crack the code. Ultimately, it turns out that this group of readers are a secret society known as the Unbroken Spine. Their primary goal? Immortality, which can be revealed if you crack the ultimate code on founder Alfred Manutius’s book.

There’s some pretty intriguing, National Treasure-esque stuff involving the secret society, their awesome underground reading room, and the struggle to crack Manutius’s code. There’s also a LOT of detail about the inner workings of Google, which again, I wonder how much is accurate. I was hoping/expecting there would be some sort of author’s note at the end but no luck. I really liked Clay as a narrator -- he was the appropriate Everyman around whom the other characters could rotate. I also enjoyed the titular Penumbra; he reminds me a bit of what I think my thesis adviser will turn into when he’s older. However, some of the supporting characters were a little too quirky (ugh, I so hate that word) for my tastes. I really was not a fan of Kat -- the character trope or the character herself. And Clay’s two best friends, Mat the designer and Neel who apparently has built an empire around computer-generated boobs... too much. Granted, Mat and Neel don’t play a hugely significant role in the story, and they are best served as side characters.

I also liked that Sloan kept everything firmly grounded in the land of realistic fiction. With the whole search for immortality, things could have taken a bizarre (and, to me, unwelcome) turn for science fiction. But I liked that the solution to the puzzle (view spoiler)[ was the simplest one, and the one anyone could have figured out from the beginning -- we achieve immortality not by physically living forever, but by leaving behind our stories. That’s honestly one of my favorite themes, when done right (as it is here). (hide spoiler)]

This is kind of a terrible review, but I made a promise to myself that I’d review everything I read so I can remember it! And I figured out last year that it does actually make a difference -- the one book I never truly reviewed, I completely forgot the plot, and the few books that I wrote really short reviews of are pretty hazy in my memory. But I enjoyed this. It was a quick read, and I think it would be an appropriate addition to next year’s classroom shelf.