What To Do with All These Books?: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

If I had a time machine and could travel forward 150 years, I would find someone studying literary history and insist that she should read Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore if she wants to understand the complicated relationship between books and computers in 2014.

Yes, I know, that probably sounds sort of strange as a fantasy. However, as someone who studies literature, it makes sense. There is much debate about how representative any set of texts might be, whether we're talking about the canon, forgotten works that have been recently recovered, or the abundance of novels that we now have the technology to study without actually reading. The most significant realization to come out of distant reading is that we can no longer pretend that the narrow swath of books that we've traditionally studied is anything but a tiny fraction of what was read in a particular period.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, on the other hand, is beautifully representative because it absolutely captures our relation to technology in the current moment. A similar example is Sophie Kinsella's I've Got Your Number, which weaves our dependence on smart phones into its narrative structure.

Let me back up: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is a novel about seeing books - books as data, books as holding mystical secrets, books as narratives. The narrator dabbles in data visualization, and the book's central quest begins with him visualizing the "reading" (decoding, actually) patterns of the strange patrons who frequent the bookstore where he works.

I don't want to give too much away, but the tensions in the narrative come from competing ideas about what books are for. Google, and all of its computational power, is pitted against traditional and mystical ways of interacting with books. On one level, this is a narrative about whether books are information to be processed or narratives to be savored. Ultimately, what's at stake is what we want from books in the context of both large-scale digitization and the labor-intensive study that we often devote to books that are deemed worthy of unpacking. I won't tell you who wins.