#mr. penumbra's 24-hour bookstore

[escapeintothepages]

“All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight.”

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan

[trek-tracks]

Star Trek fans are everywhere

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[onemanplagueoflocusts]

Breakfast and Books / Sourdough and Sourdough Reading Robin Sloan's brilliant book, Sourdough while eating a local sourdough toast and marmalade at The Wild Herb Cafe in Holt, Wiltshire. Sourdough is a whimsical, genre-blending novel that follows Lois Clary, a lonely software engineer in San Francisco who stumbles into a new life after inheriting a mysterious sourdough starter from two eccentric brothers. As she begins using the starter to bake bread, Lois finds herself drawn into a secretive, avant-garde food underground that challenges the boundaries of technology, tradition, and biology... even reason! Robin Sloan is the author of the excellent Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and there are hints that this book is even set in the same universe (or Penumbraverse). I really enjoyed it; there’s robots, weird bread, and a whole lot of existential vibes. If you've ever wanted to sack off your job, bake something slightly haunted, and find your people in the unlikeliest of places, this book’s a treat.

[ask-theredcrown]

Hey Narinder, got any story suggestions?

(Same with mod? If that's okay?)

"The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is an interesting one, it's short, you can finish it in a day, but it's so worth it."

[cupofteajones]

Quote of the Day - June 23, 2025

[bookaddict24-7]

“Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.”

―Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

[escapeintothepages]

“I've never listened to an audiobook before, and I have to say it's a totally different experience. When you read a book, the story definitely takes place in 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.”

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan

[sleepandblog]

5-4-3-2-1 book tag !

five books i love

1. demon copperhead by barbara kingsolver

2. the da vinci code by dan brown

3. solitaire by alice oseman

4. the seven husbands of evelyn hugo by taylor jenkins reid

5. turtles all the way down by john green

four books on my tbr

1. the hunger games by suzanne collins

2. just mercy by bryan stevenson

3. on the road by jack kerouac

4. moby dick by herman melville

three books i recommend

1. brain on fire by susannah cahalan

2. everything is tuberculosis by john green

3. on earth we're briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong

two books i read recently

1. mr. penumbra's 24-hour bookstore by robin sloan

2. the vanishing half by brit bennett

one book i'm currently reading

1. five total strangers by natalie d. richards

it's almost 2am so my pics suck but i didn't feel like waiting to do this adjhdgjcf

[agardenandlibrary]

Books Read in August 2024

August is already over?? I had a pretty good reading month! September is going to be wild, since we’re closing on our new house (!!!) this week and moving. We'll see how it goes...

Witch King by Martha Wells

I enjoyed this one a lot! Neat world & history. 

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix (audiobook)

Finally trying more Nix, not just his Abhorsen books lol. Pretty good. I do love a “child of the ancient Powers discovers their heritage” story. I was pleased at how many people were excited about working in a magical bookshop (will I ever forgive Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore? Only time will tell). 

The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart (for the podcast)

This was SO GOOD. I’ve heard the sequels ARE NOT. Full of hubris, I believe I will go on anyway, that’s how good this book was! 

Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold

The History of the quaddies! Overall, good! I really liked the decisions to take personal responsibility – Graf being like “someone should help these kids – fuck it, I’M someone”. Another line that stuck with me was Graf on the station being threatened by someone planetside, another person planetside saying “You have to stop him” and Graf saying “Hey, I’m out in space. You’re in the same room. You stop him.”

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

I do love a living city. Curious how it ends, since I know it was supposed to be a trilogy and then got turned into a duology instead.

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher (audiobook)

It’s a Kingfisher! Very good & interesting take on the Goose Girl story. That sure was a fucked up horse! I do love those geese!

The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer (for the podcast)

And the month ended with a whimper. Return to the world of your childhood portal fantasy! Be overall disappointed with how the story was told! The interjected “storyteller corners” could’ve been better if they’d been completely different. Oh well.

[liketwoswansinbalance]

Got any book recs? Not a specific genre or anything, just some of your favorites.

Most of these are YA and middle grade fiction. I probably suffer from nostalgia and recency bias in some cases.

⸻

In no particular order:

The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge by Eugene Yelchin and M.T. Anderson

The Someday Birds by Sally J. Pla

Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo

The Penderwicks series Jeanne Birdsall

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl by Stacy McAnulty

The Land of Stories series by Chris Colfer

A Tale of Magic prequels by Chris Colfer

Dead Wednesday by Jerry Spinelli

The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict by Trenton Lee Stewart

The Glittering Court by Richelle Mead

The Line Tender by Kate Allen

The Siren by Kiera Cass

Divergent series by Veronica Roth

Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Valkyrie by Kate O'Hearn

Texting the Underworld by Ellen Booraem

The Thousandth Floor by Katharine McGee

Grounded: The Adventures of Rapunzel by Megan Morrison

The Princess Tales series by Gail Carson Levine

The Thirteenth Goldfish duology by Jennifer L. Holm

The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin

The Don Tillman trilogy by Graeme Simsion

The World Ends in April by Stacy McAnulty

The Next-Great Paulie Fink by Ali Benjamin

Counting by 7’s by Holly Goldberg Sloan

A Mango-Shaped Space by Wendy Mass

Any classic fairy tales

Anything written by Roald Dahl

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

Quiet by Susan Cain

[specificpollsaboutbooks]

Submissions for books about books :

Assistant to the Villain (Hannah Nicole)

A Month of Sundays (Liz Byrski)

The Grandest Bookshop in the World (Amelia Mellor)

Lirael (Garth Nix)

Inkheart series (Cornelia Funke)

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (Satoshi Yagisawa)

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (Italo Calvino)

The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafón)

The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde)

House Of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski)

Book Lovers (Emily Henry)

Beach Read (Emily Henry)

The Jane Austen Book Club (Karen Joy Fowler)

The Neverending Story (Michael Ende)

Secret Identity (Alex Segura)

The Book Thief (Markus Zusak)

Cloud Cuckoo Land (Anthony Doerr)

Possession (A.S. Byatt)

Long Live Evil (Sarah Rees Brennan)

Afterworlds (Scott Westerfeld)

Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore (Robin Sloan)

The Sentence (Louise Erdrich)

The Bromance Book Club (Lyssa Kay Adams)

Stoner (John Williams)

Bookshops and Bonedust (Travis Baldree)

Parnassus on Wheels (Christopher Morley)

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows)

The Well of Ascension (Book 2 of Mistborn series) (Brandon Sanderson)

The List (Patricia Forde)

The Book of Lies (James Molonet)

Princess Bride (William Goldman)

Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)

Matilda (Roald Dahl)

The Starless Sea (Erin Morgenstern)

The Labyrinth House Murders (Yukito Ayatsuji)

The Prague Cemetery (Umberto Eco)

Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco)

The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)

Ink Blood Sister Scribe (Emma Torzs)

The Book Eaters (Sunyi Dean)

Magpie Murders (Anthony Horowitz)

Ban This Book (Alan Gratz)

Between the Lines (Jodi Picoult, Samantha van Leer)

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London (Garth Nix)

The Library of the Unwritten (A. J. Hackwith)

The Cat Who Saved Books (Sōsuke Natsukawa)

Suggested Reading (Dave Connis)

The Truth about the Harry Québert Affair (Joël Dicker)

Hygiène de l’Assassin (Amélie Nothomb)

[quaranmine]

now you got me curious on on earth kinda book are you reading that uses the word google too much?

It's Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. A main character works for Google. But Google was already being referenced before she showed up. But anyway yes the book basically talks about how great Google is what feels like every page and plot points are being solved by using Google machinery and Google programming and Google features and--

I want main character girl to get laid off immediately following the book.

Also I'm over 50% in and it seems like they're setting up a main plot point for the second half of the book to be "let's steal a priceless totally-unique-to-the-world book from a (private) library so we can upload it to Google and basically give ownership of it to a megacorp!" I think the place they're stealing it from is weird too (I don't know enough about it yet to agree if they're all evil or not) and the desire to have knowledge accessible is a noble one but I am just kind of stunned that this is....a plot point? That an author was like "yes, let's heavily feature a real-world company as a core plot point"? I feel like the much easier way to do this would be to like, idk, take it to a museum?

I would love it if all this Google-talk came back around to bite the characters before the end but based on the reviews I have read, it doesn't seem like Google ever gets portrayed in any other light than hero worship.... Also, the author must specify every time that the main character guy owns a Macbook. And a kindle. They talk about Skype. The product placement bores me.

The book is from 2012 so I think a lot of things just didn't age well. There's a lot of oogling at technology that now feels ancient (like video calling) and mentions of apps that were popular at the time such as Fruit Ninja. There will always be things that don't age well in fiction but I feel like as an author it is not all that difficult to minimize your references to certain things in order to keep a story grounded so it doesn't feel horribly outdated after barely a decade.

But I am also just sour because I assumed going into it that this was a kind of magical realism story about an old bookshop and instead it seems like megacorp tech worship.

[evesbeve]

hello eve! i’m a fairly new follower to your blog and i wanna say that i appreciate you for being such a good update blog for justin! with that said, i’m just wondering, has justin ever made a list of his favourite books? if yes, can you kindly share them with us? thanks for your help! 💓

(edit 2024: so i just found this in my drafts and idk why i never posted the actual answer 😭💜 i'm so so so sorry for taking literal years to get back to you for this oopsie,,, enjoy this very belated response JDHSHS)

Aaaa that’s so sweet of you to say, thank you so much!!

I don’t think he’s made a full list, but I’ve taken screenshots of quite a lot of the book recs he’s made, so I put something together!

Books he's mentioned:

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami)

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Mark Haddon)

Everything I Never Told You (Celeste Ng)

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (Robin Sloan)

Tell The Wolves I'm Home (Carol Rifka Brunt)

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Ocean Vuong)

Books he's mentioned and said he loves/likes:

The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)

Life After Life (Kate Atkinson)

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Lydia Davis)

A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara)

+ Anton Checkhov in general

Obviously this isn't everything but just some that I wrote down 💜💜

[things-that-altered-my-brain]

TRACKING MY EYES

(LIST OF Media I have consumed)

2025

( E-english, H-hindi, K-korean)

MOVIES

Animated-

nimona (10)

TANGLED

the Mitchells v/s the machines

spirit untamed

frozen 1

Anastasia

next gen (8)

the willoughbys

over the moon

wreck it Ralph 1 and 2

encanto

frozen 2 (6)

canvas (short film)

Anastasia

Flow(half watched)

Hindi

barfi (10)

chor nikal ke bhaga (10)

Darlings

ek main aur ek tuu

ek vivah aisa bhi

forensic

hasee to phasee

Lootera

om shanti om

Qala

queen

Uri

dhoom dhaam

7 khoon maaf (9)

dear zindagi

dil chahta hai

dil dhadkne do

Wake up Sid

bhool bhulaiya

doctor G (8)

kal ho na ho

zindagi na milegi Dobara

gori tere pyaar m (7)

kuch kuch hota hai

kabhi khushi kabhi gham

plan A plan B

Tamasha

OMG (oh my god) (6)

Ye Jawani Hai deewani

fitoor (5)

I hate luv stories

kabhi alvida naa kehna

dilwale 2015

jaane tu ya jaane na

dil se

hum sath sath hai (no ratings for these lol)

happy new year

hum apke hai kaun

sooryavansham

dil hai tumhara

meenakshi sundereshwar

Talash

Khoobsurat

english

good will hunting

BARBIE

Half of it

fundamentals of caring

edge of seventeen

red white and royal blue

the baby sitter killer queen

crazy rich asians

Enola holmes 1 n 2

knives out 1 n 2

confessions of a shopaholic

the intern

love at first sight

Eternal sunshine of spotless mind

Irish wish

How to lose a guy in 10 days

before triology

mona lisa smile

just like heaven

the notebook

the life list

people places things

First daughter

Love in taipie

Your place or mine

The royal treatment

Romance in style

korean

tune in for love

love and leashes

kill boksoon

Other

King xian's worm valley of ghost blowing lamp (chinese)

SERIES

lockwood n co

looking for alaska

heartstopper

Carmen San Diego

extraordinary attorney woo

blue birthday

Love to hate you

When the phone rings

MR PLANKTON

run on

celebrity

true beauty

see you in my 19th life

our beloved summer

my ID is Gangnam beauty

because this is my first life

business proporsal

nevertheless

masaba masaba

my demon

destined with you

vincenzo

reborn rich

start up

Heeramandi

its okay not to be okay (goingon)

gilmore girls (going on)

Trunk

The girl who sees scents

The bet

The royals

Geek girl

The potato lab

The secrets of shiledars

BOOKS

the unhoneymooners- Christina Lauren

nothing lasts forever- Sidney Sheldon

Since You've Been Gone by Morgan Matson

turtles all the way down- john green

to all the boys I've loved before (book 2 and 3 specially)

One of us is lying- Karen McManus

One of us is next (sequel)

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour bookstore- robin sloan

Eleanor and park

Anna and the French kiss

The Spanish love deception

The love hypothesis

before the coffee gets cold book 1 and 2

the alchemist

the mystery of the blue train

the 7 husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Beautiful world where are you

tbr-

one of us is back (triology)

lockwood and co

PLAYS

mujhe amritaa chahiye (yogesh tripathi)

WEBCOMICS

the omniscient reader

i love yoo

the greatest estate developer

operation true love

morgana and oz

reunion

to tame a fire

maybe meant to be

lets get divorced

the fox club

raven saga

completed

Seasons of blossom

Day time star

Wish you were dead

Bad signs

Muse on fame

secretary out of order

see you in my 19th life

take me im yours

your letter

til debt do us part

our beloved summer

unholy blood

sweet home

long after the ending

the make up remover

age matters

a chance at last

gourment hound

the nuna at our office

cherry blossoms

my boo

her bucket list

super secret

oh!holy

mom, im sorry

lilac 200%

scorching romance

garden club detective squad

the hip guy

kind of love

unTouchable

witch hunt

cinnamonroll

[wanlittlehusk]

4 + 13 + 20 for the book asks!

already did 20!

4. Did you discover any new authors that you love this year? so many!! Marian Engel is first to mind but I also loved the Joy Williams I read and I'm psyched to dig into her more. Oh and this is the year I finally read Eve Babitz and also briefly used her as psychic protection. Thank you I USED TO BE CHARMING

13. What were your least favorite books of the year? LMAO. I read THE EVERY by dave eggers and that sucked absolute ass idk why I did that. Also MR PENUMBRAS 24 HOUR BOOKSTORE which ends with them selling their beautiful used bookstore to go into web consulting. Silicon valley slop