If you haven’t discovered Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore yet, add it to your reading list, or better yet, go get a copy and read it now. For me, it was a fabulous find at the local library. A bit surprising since my local library is tiny…I may actually own more books than they have in their fiction section and much of the shelves are filled with popular fiction and mysteries.

I went to pick up a book I requested. The library makes up for its small size by being part of system so I can usually get most any book I want delivered to my branch. But, I always take some time to browse as well, just to see what books might call to me. Browsing shelves is one of the joys of the bibliophile not really offered by ebooks. You can browse electronically, of course, but you can’t pull the book off the shelf and touch it, see how it feels in your hands, really interact with it in a way you can’t electronically. During this browsing adventure, I found two surprises: a new Joanne Harris novel called Peaches for Father Francis, the third in her series about Vianne, who first appeared in Chocolat. I stayed up well past my bedtime finishing it.

But it was the second book that was the real surprise since I wasn’t familiar with the author, Robin Sloan, but I took the book home with me purely because it has “bookstore” in the title. It turns out Mr. Penumbra was Sloan’s first novel. It was the best of the bunch and may be one of the best books I’ve read this year, no mean feat since I’m getting close to 70 books this year. The story included ancient books, a secret society, cryptography, technology, and a bit of fantasy thrown in. The main character is on a quest, aided by friends who just happen to work for legendary companies like Google and Industrial Light and Magic. The story is formed around nuggets of history with Aldus Manutius playing a role. (For my grammarian friends, Manutius is credited with creating the semicolon.) There is some discussion of old knowledge (OK) and what we’ve lost in our increasingly digitally mediated age. And, did I mention that the cover glows in the dark, something I discovered after I turned off the light one night.

Sloan calls himself a media inventor who worked at Twitter and because of this, there is great web support for the novel that allows a digitally-inclined reader like myself to spend happy hours exploring, a practice that helps extend my enjoyment of the original book. I’ve pulled together a few resources that you’ll find in the next post.

The last paragraph doesn’t reveal anything but seems to describe the sometimes magical experience of being a reader:

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.

You can get a digital copy of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, but I don’t think the experience will be the same.