“Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines — it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.”
I have read so many reviews of this book, mostly here on Cannonball Read, so I don’t really have anything new to add to the subject. I also strongly feel like it’s one of those books that’s more fun if you know nothing going into it: just sit down, and start reading.
Briefly, it stars Clay Jannon as an unemployed web designer who has found a job at a rather odd 24-hour book store ran by a strange man named (you guessed it!) Mr. Penumbra. While Clay rarely sells a book in his time working the overnight shift, he does have collection of patrons who come in at all hours to borrow ancient tomes from what he calls “the Wayback”. His job is to write down elaborate, detailed descriptions of these people. He’s also not supposed to read any of the books in the Wayback. Obviously, if he’d followed these rules, it wouldn’t be much of a story.
This is definitely a book written for the digital age — a large portion of it takes place at Google, and there’s a lot of tech-y people who comprise Clay’s friends and fellow curious readers. But on the flip side, it’s a love story to the power of the written (and spoken word).
Goodreads has this novel listed as the first of a series — I’ll be interested to see what comes next for Clay and Kat and Neel.