Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

by Robin Sloan

Aunt Laurie once recommended this book to me, and sometime after she died I picked it up at a used book store. I didn’t make any plans to read it until one day stumbling across a really good blog post, looking into the author, and learning that it was Robin Sloan, author of this book. I think the blog post was [this one, “An app can be a home-cooked meal”] (https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/).

This was a quick, fun story that hit a lot of things I like: philosophical without being too serious, some cryptic puzzles, a secret society centered around a bookstore, etc.

I don’t have a lot of notes from reading this, but I liked it. A couple of things I did note:

The idea of Old Knowledge and Traditional Knowledge (OK and TK), knowledge in old books and in people’s heads. “Imagine if we could make all that OK/TK available all the time, to everyone. On the web, on your phone. No question would go unanswered ever again.” (84)

Is this a good thing? We already have way too much information available on our phones. Using music as an example: When I had to dig through piles of CDs, I would buy one, kind of taking a chance on it, and usually listen to it over and over for at least a while. Now, when every song in human history is on my phone, I listen to less music, and I often skip a new song the first time there’s a boring part. You couldn’t invent Pink Floyd in this world – no one would have the patience (including the band!).

Pete Holmes has a bit about this that I think of often. This is somewhat paraphrased, typing it out while listening to a recording:

I have Google on my phone now. It's ruining our lives. It's ruining life. Because we know everything, but we're not any smarter. If you don't know something, wait two seconds -- you WILL know. There's no time for mystery of wonder. You start to wonder something, and then you know.

But the time between knowing and not knowing is so brief, that knowing feels exactly like not knowing... So life is meaningless! I've been in bed in the morning, just like,. "Where's Tom Petty from?" (looks it up, sighs)

There was a time when if you didn't know where Tom Petty was from, you just didn't know. And you felt that yearning, and that deficit in your being, and you'd go around and you'd ask actual people. "Where's Tom Petty from?" "I don't know... and now I'm impregnated with wonder!" Until one fateful day you see a girl wearing a Heartbreakers t-shirt, and you rush up to her and ask her Where's Tom Petty from, and she tells you: Florida. And a wave of endorphins and pleasure and meaning would wash over you, and you felt something, and that's how you met your wife. Do you understand? Your wedding some was _Refugee_.

Also this line: “We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment – maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.” (122) He (the author) is being cute here – I doubt he really believes we’re living in a simulation, more like he doesn’t care either way. But in this post-postmodern tech age, you can casually say things like this. Just as past ages could casually refer to Biblical people, etc.

Looking at e-readers, a Nook and a Sony go unremarked, but a Kobo? “Really? Who has a Kobo?” (131) And yet here we are, 13 years after he wrote this, and Kobo e-readers are still around. Sony and Nook, not so much.

Festina lente. Make haste slowly.