Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is a nerdy dude’s ode to everything nerdy dudes love: technology, coding, tabletop RPGs, startup culture, smart people, boobs (not a typo), books, typefaces, and everything else in that vein, including the dorky guys that get the beautiful girls. It’s set in San Francisco, in an old-school bookstore with …
The Sense of an Ending
Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending opens with a list of memories and an almost ominous warning, “But what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.” It is a deceptively simple book — in that it’s not simple at all and to get it, you have to think …
The Imperfectionists
If you didn’t already, take a look at the subtitle. I did not like this book and was, in fact, offended by it. Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists takes us into the inner workings and private lives of a cadre of professionals at an English-language newspaper based in Rome. The novel is told in a series …
Love and Houses
I recently re-read this book, which I picked up randomly from the shelves of the public library almost 15 years ago. I think I probably thought the cover was cute. But I remembered it and bought it a while back off Amazon since I’d really enjoyed it the first time around. It’s hard to explain …
The Age of Miracles
As Karen Walker Thompson’s The Age of Miracles opens, the world is in the initial stages of “the slowing” — a gradual decline in the speed of its rotation on the Earth’s axis. This is, of course, problematic, and sends our narrator Julia’s life into chaos, along with the rest of the world’s population. I …