This book has a lot of characters and a lot of locations and a lot of describing of screens and codes. There's also this one annoying part at the end that makes me think that Robin Sloan has never actually been to an indoor climbing wall, because you don't just toss the holds up on the wall and leave them there forever, Robin, you move them around or else they get polished and the climbers get bored because you can't just climb the exact same route a bazillion times sans consequence. This climbing gym thing is entirely unimportant to the overall plot, but it did push me over the edge from "this is okay" to "meh". Admittedly that is not a very big push over a very big edge, but what I'm trying to say is this: this book isn't overly thrilling or engaging, but it's fine.
So. Clay, our protagonist, by way of some fortuitous events, finds himself working nights at the titular bookstore, where a bunch of weird happenings regularly occur. TURNS OUT, there is some kind of code buried in the books that the majority of customers obsess over. Clay starts figuring out that they are all in a secret bookish club, and so on and so forth aren't books great?
Clay manages to be both dude-ly and nerdy, but he's not annoying so that's a bonus since this book is in first-person. He's a biiiit like Lincoln in Attachments by Rainbow Rowell but nothing about this book is as charming as Attachments. The story follows Clay as he discovers the secret book-based society, makes friends, dates someone who works at Google, and so on. The other characters in this book are an interesting lot, but there are so many of them and Dickens this is not. WHY SO MANY. I kept putting this book down for long-ish stretches of time and then picking it up again and having to review which one was what one and who was who.
There's some conflict and some tension but it's all very minimal and somewhat anti-climactic. This book is a book that pats you on the back for being a person who reads books but doesn't do much else. Basically: it's a book about information, and the process of turning data into information and information into knowledge and how that process has changed and is likely to change and how sometimes things can revert back to data and how important good classification systems are. Well, maybe not so much about classification systems but BELIEVE ME, classification is very important to the getting of knowledge.
I think this is a book that kinda wanted to be a movie, you know? It's neither here nor there and I wouldn't bother reading it if I were you. Read Attachments instead.
