Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

It’s always a treat to find a book with the all things you love in life.

Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore ticks all the boxes for me. It contains all these elements:

• bookstores and working in bookstores
• set in San Francisco - my favourite city in the world
• a secret book club filled with eccentric characters
• fonts – which play an important part in the story
• detour in New York – my second favourite city.

The story begins with Clay Jannon, an out work web designer, who finds himself working the night shift at an old fashioned bookstore:Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.  

Because of the economic downturn,  Clay mourns for a web design career cut short before reaching its peak.

So instead off all things digital he now finds himself in a world of print and dealing with borrwwing cards and catalogues. Oh and he also get's involved in a secretive book club.

Clay's adventures takes him from San Francisco to New York, with a detour onto Google’s campus.

Along the way Clay has help from his childhood best friend who is now mega rich and owns a lucrative start up, an attractive Google employee and flat mate who works at Industrial Light and Magic. 

See how much fun it is already? This book revels in it’s all its geekiness and I can’t remember a book I have enjoyed so much.

Needless to say, Dungeons and Dragons and sci fi are heavily featured in the story!

As well as a rollicking adventure book, what makes Sloan’s book a real standout is that it’s absolutely laugh out funny.  

He writes with such a dry wit, taking a very sly, but also endearing take, on the whole tech start up culture in SF and the relationship between print and digital, ‘old knowledge’ and ‘new knowledge’.

Sloan is a former Twitter employee and I also loved all the details about Google and the way it operates.

As Kevin McFarland notes in his review, 

Sloan’s depiction of startup culture in San Francisco is positively dead-on and bitingly funny, and taking the story to Google’s Mountain View campus offers plenty of opportunities to poke holes in the puffed-up egos of the digital behemoth.

In the end the book is a passionate embrace of all things digital and print.

As a passionate reader who has embraced ebooks in the past year it also really resonated with me. What have we gained and what have we lost with the shift to ebooks?

Back to fiction: The Sisters Brothers

In 2012, non-fiction featured quite heavily in my reading list so it’s nice to end the year by going back to fiction. 

It's holiday time and I just wanted a great story to take me away.  Patrick Dewitt’s The Sisters Brothers, certainly did that!

This book is a strange, violent and compelling Western about two brothers who are assassins.

Yes that is right, I read a Western! I must admit the Western is a genre that I’m not too familiar with and don’t have much of an interest in.

Dewitt’s book, described as a ‘revisionist Western’, tracks the relationship and adventures of the much feared and loathed Charlie and Eli Sisters who are on a job to kill a gold prospector Hermit Kermit Warm.

Set in the 'wild West' of the Gold Rush era, the story is told from the perspective of Eli Sisters and it’s really his voice that really makes the novel so interesting, original and at times very poetic.


An overweight, sensitive, romnatic and philosophical assassin is the last thing you expect in a Western genre, but Eli Sisters is exactly that. 

I’m not sure that The Sisters Brothers has ignited my interest in Western, but it is certainly a terrific read.  

It’s hard to describe this strange, funny, violent and compelling story but from the first chapter it had me totally hooked. 

One reviewer described the book as a bit like a Coen brothers movie, which is very apt as you are either a fan of their type of movies or not. There really is no in between. 

I'm a big fan of the Coen brothers, so I really enjoy this type of story telling with quirky characters and situations.  

It’s a sign of a great writer when the story and characters stay inside your head long after you have finished the book.

Charlie and Eli Sisters have certainly stayed with me.

Justin Cronin’s The Twelve

Book two finally arrived! 

The Twelve is Justin Cronin’s eagerly awaited sequel to The Passage, his best-selling ‘adult’ vampire novel.

I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this novel, especially as The Passage was one of my favourite books of 2010.

I was so eager to be transported back to the post-apocalyptic world of virals.

Where The Passage was a more intense and  emotionally gripping read, this second book shifts the series into an action/thriller genre.

But the main problem is that does so in a very slow way. It isn’t until a good third into the book that the pace picks up and the characters all converge to (another) climatic battle scene.

In these sections, you do have to admire Cronin’s ability to drive the narrative forward creating a gripping and compelling page turner. 

A lot the set peices are perfect for the Ridley Scott produced movie to come.

The final battle scene is so vivid, with the gore and violence certainly pitched up a notch.

But unfortunately the start of the book did leave me a little bit cold and I had to really persevere.

For me the book certainly didn’t hit the high notes of The Passage, and in some ways get a bit too swallowed up in its own mythology.

Overall, I felt that Cronin just wasn’t able to sustain the epic world that he created so wonderfully and vividly in The Passage.

Here's hoping Book Three: The City of Mirrors (2014-really so long again!!!) brings back some of the spark.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen

 Science writer, David Quammen’s new book Spillover: animal infections and next human pandemic focuses on how diseases pass on from wild animals into humans - a process called spillover.

His account covers such zoonotic diseases as SARS, AIDS, bubonic plague, Lyme disease, West Nile fever, Marburg virus, swine flu, bird flu and Hendra virus.

Sounds very dry and boring, but don’t be fooled as Quammen is a fantastic writer, story teller and funny to boot.

In his NYT review, Dwight Garner gives this exampe of Quammen's gallows humour.

“Advisory: If your husband catches an ebola virus give him food and water and love and maybe prayers but keep your distance, wait patiently, hope for the best — and, if he dies, don’t clean out his bowels by hand. Better to step back, blow a kiss and burn the hut.”

This book reads like a thriller as Quammen traces the beginnings of spillovers, the initial medical responses to contain them and then the often frantic scientific sleuth work to discover the causes.

He also interviews an array of imminent scientists and goes on site with them to capture bats, birds and various other animals. 

What Quammen does throughout the book is to emphasis the way in which the increasing human encroachment on what was once wild habitats is a key factor. This is a salient point that he returns to at the end of the book.

I’ll admit there are moments in the book where I struggled with science and did skim through some of the more technical accounts of DNA and RNA. Quammen is sympathetic to his reading, noting in one particularly dense paragraph that:

“If you followed all that, at a quick reading, you have a future in biology.”

I did find Quammen’s explanation of retroviruses very easy to understand and his chapter on the search for the original cause of AIDS one of the best parts of the book. 

Overall, this is a very approachable book and Quammen's writing is wonderfully lucid, clear and compelling.

Too many books, too little time!

One of the best iPad apps I’ve downloaded is Longform which post non-fiction articles from a range of sources (Wired, Atlantic, Vanity Fair etc).

It’s extremely easy to use and allows you to read long form journalism  in an ereader or web format, as well as save it on Readability for later on.

What is fantastic about Longform is that the articles have often spurred me onto some great books.

So much so, that I’m reading several books on a range of topics at the same time:

  

Anonymous and cyber activism:

This Wired.com article on how Anonymous picks targets led me to British journalist Parmy Olsen’s We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency (2012). I'm in the middle of this and so far its an interesting and detailed account of some of the key players in the rise and development of Anonymous and LulzSec.  

The article also led me to watch the recent documentary We are Legion: The story of hacktivist, which offered a much more positive view of the Anonymous and hacktivism. I thought the analogy that the distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) should be viewed as a contemporary form of a 'sit in' is an interesting and worthwile point.

 

But the best book I’ve read so far is Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997). Written by Australian academic Suelette Dreyfus, it’s a thrilling non-fiction account of the early days of hacking and features ‘Mendax’ – Julian Assange. 

It took Dreyfus three years of research and although non-fiction, it reads like a complex and ingenious thriller. The cat and mouse game between these young hackers, security experts and later on the FBI and police unfolds like a great drama.

I’m looking forward to the telemovie, Underground: the Julian Assange story which is based on Dreyfus' book and screens tonight in Australia.

 Some other great books via Longform articles:

• The Last Greatest Magician in the World: Howard Thurston Versus Houdini and the battles of the American wizards (2012) by Jim Steinmeyer. This biography tracks the rise and fall of Howard Thurston and has delicious scenes of the competition and one up-manship between Thurston and Houdini. This book reminds of Christoper Preist’s brilliant masterpiece The Prestige (1996).

 

• American journanlist Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2012).  Boo's book is an “embedded” journalistic account of the life of resident in the Annawadi slum, located in Mumbai. It's a deeply moving, funny, and painful account of poverty and flaws of human nature.    

• Just got my hands on the recently published Spillover:Animal infections and the next human pandemic (2012) by David Quammen. Haven't read it yet, but looks fascinating and got a great NYT review. 

 Okay, now it's time for me to get back to reading all these books!