Climate change has changed summer reading. It used to be that you’d find a book to read while you sat in the sun on the beach. In this climate-changed world, now you might find a book to read while you sit inside hoping that your house doesn’t flood. So today, while rain pounded on the roof of our apartment, I finished reading two books about bookstores, and started reading another one.
(There are some spoilers below. If that bothers you, proceed no further.)
Friends don’t let friends buy from Amazon — support your local booksellers!
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan (Picador, 2021) starts off with a promising premise. There’s a strange bookstore in San Francisco that’s open 24 hours. Clay Jannon, a twenty-something who lost his job in an economic downturn, gets hired by Mr. Penumbra, the owner of this bookstore, to work the graveyard shift. It turns out that people don’t buy books at the bookstore, they mostly borrow books. They borrow the books in order to solve a secret code that’s embedded in the physical layout of the books in the bookstore.
But that’s just the beginning. There are a couple of dozen similar bookstores around the world, each embodying a similar puzzle that can be solved. Once you solve the puzzle of your nearest bookstore, then you can get inducted into a bizarre cult-like organization that’s been in existence since the late medieval period. If you continue to advance in this secret organization, you get to write the history of your life into a book that then gets distributed to the other bookstores in this organization.
And there’s an even bigger puzzle to solve. Clay Jannon decides to solve the puzzle using computers, mostly because he’s trying to impress a young woman he’s fallen for who works for Google. As a mystery, this book is pretty much of a failure — when Clay finally solves the final puzzle, it turns out to be utterly trivial. Because the puzzle is solved, the San Francisco bookstore goes out of business, so Clay and Mr. Penumbra open a tech consulting business. Just like the solution to the puzzle in the book, the book itself feels fairly trivial.
Finally, if you like books and bookstores, this is a depressing book. Its message seems to be — books are outdated, and bookstores deserve to be replaced with rock climbing gyms. (Which seems to beg the question — Why then should I bother reading this book?)
A trivial mystery, but fine for summer reading.
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore on Kirkus Reviews
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa (2010; trans. Eric Ozawa, HarperCollins, 2013) follows twenty-something Takako after she breaks up with her sort-of-boyfriend Hideaki, after he blithely tells her one day that he’s going to marry another young woman, and oh-by-the-way they can continue sleeping together. Takako quits her job so she doesn’t have to see Hideaki or his fiancee any more.
Out of financial desperation, Takako ends up working for her uncle Satoru, who owns a bookshop that sells used books. Satoru’s shop specializes in modern Japanese fiction. Her uncle can’t pay her a salary, but there’s a room above the bookshop where she can live. Eventually, Takako starts reading modern Japanese fiction, and the books pull her out of her depression. She starts going to a coffeeshop near the bookshop where she finds good coffee and interesting people. Satoru’s wife reappears after a years-long absence. Takako and Satoru’s wife go on a weekend trip together. And so on, one gentle happening after another. At the end of this gentle book, everyone is happy.
If you don’t expect too much, this is not a bad book. It won’t give you any insight into actual life in a bookstore. It may lack intellectual content. But it is heart-warming.
A trivial heartwarming romance, fine for summer reading.
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop on Kirkus Reviews
Remainders of the Day (Godine, 2022) is the third volume of a fictionalized diary by an actual bookseller. The previous two volumes — Diary of a Bookseller (2017) and Confessions of a Bookseller (2019) — told the story of Bythell’s used bookstore in Wigtown, Scotland, during the years 2014 and 2015. Bythell likes to complain about stupid things customers say, which is not very endearing, but he paints a stark portrait of what it’s like trying to run a used bookstore during the age of Amazon and ebooks.
When the second volume of his diary ends, he has divorced his wife Anna, and managed to alienate his eccentric employee Nicky to the point that she resigns. When Carol and I finished the second volume, we both wanted to know what happened next. But — now that we’re about halfway into the third book — apparently nothing much happens.
I’d have to say that Bythell would have been better off not writing the present book. However, if you’re a fan of his first two books, you’ll probably want to read this one anyway. Or if you’ve never read the first two volumes, you might find this an interesting insight into modern-day bookselling. And reading this book will give you far more real information about actual bookstores than in either of the other two books.
Worth reading, even if it’s not up to the level of his previous books.