“Well, actually, I love books because books are my best
friends.” Truth.
61.12 Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
I loved this book.
Yes, it is a little sugary sweet, and yes, it is a whole lot nerdy (and
there may be a royalty check for Google in the mail), but it is also full of
wonderful people and places. It is
about the love of books, and words, and print. It is about learning, and creating, and evolving. It is a quest story with a hero who
isn’t looking for the answer but for the solution, and he is looking not for
himself but for his friends, and when he finds it it is poignant and simple and
timely. He counts on his friends,
and they pay him back in kind, and we see that sometimes life and immortality
are the same. I will forever be
hopeful that upon entering a bookstore, the man behind the counter might just
ask, “What do you seek in these shelves?”
On a side note, I used the above picture instead of just the
sole cover because this is the picture I used on my Twitter feed for the
#Dailybookpic of weekend reading.
I was finishing the book on the left to start the book on the
right. And imagine my delight when
just a few pages into Penumbra, Sloan wrote this:
“My Kindle is a hand-me-down from my dad, one of the
original models, a slanted, asymmetrical plate with a tiny grey screen and a
bed of angled keys. It looks like
a prop from 2001: A Space Odyssey. There
are new Kindles with bigger screens and subtler industrial designs, but this
one is like Penumbra’s postcards: so uncool it’s cool again.”
Now, my original Kindle is not a hand-me-down from my
father, but his first Kindle was an original hand-me-down from my brother so
that isn’t far off, and if there is anything I am a pro at it is being so
uncool that I am sure that someday I just might be cool again.
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