Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, #1)

by Robin Sloan

If this sounds impressive to you, you’re over thirty.

Her home is the burrow of a bibliophile hobbit—low-ceilinged, close-walled, and brimming over with books. It is small but not uncomfortable; the air smells strongly of cinnamon and weakly of pot.

Books: boring. Codes: awesome. These are the people who are running the internet.

When you read a book, the story definitely happens inside your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes:

This is something I haven’t done in more than a decade. The last letter I wrote in ink on paper was a mushy missive to my long-distance pseudo-girlfriend in the gold-tinted week after science camp. I was thirteen. Leslie Murdoch never wrote back.

California Museum of Knitting Arts and Embroidery Sciences.

Um what?

some made of wood carved into anthropomorphic shapes.

I’m really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.

Same!

“This city of ours—it has taken me too long to realize it, but we are in the Venice of this world. The Venice.”

The Venice!

There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. It takes forty-one seconds to climb a ladder three stories tall. It’s not easy to imagine the year 3012,

but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. We have new capabilities now—strange powers we’re still getting used to. The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father. Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.

A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.