Status Update | Google Drive of Doom

Last week, something horrible happened. Not something properly horrible—nobody's dead or anything, thank the heavens—but something went wrong behind the scenes of The Speculative Scotsman. Something that's made me more than a little miserable since.

Long story short: I broke the blog.

Long story long: I got myself a fancy new phone a month or so ago, namely an HTC One M8. It's proved a huge improvement on the Samsung Galaxy S2 I'd been toting about essentially since the turn of the century; hasn't hurt that it's so easy on the eye either.

In any event, it's an Android, so it's tied to Google from the ground up: the opposite of a problem insofar as it automatically imported most everything I needed from my old mobile. My contacts and whatnot. My pictures and preferences. Then, when I took a few photos, Google Drive offered to store them in the cloud. I said sure.

This was my first mistake.

I made my second when Google Drive decided to start syncing the thousands of images tied to my email address, which, as it happens, is also my Blogger login—to wit, every picture I had ever embedded in posts on TSS was about to be backed up. This seemed an almighty waste of space and time to yours truly, so I deleted these files from the list of images to sync. What I didn't realise I was doing was deleting the images from the internet as well.

Didn't take long for the penny to drop, but by then, the damage was done.

And here we are. Since bodging the blog, I've spent any number of hours uploading old images. It's taken days—days I don't have—but I've managed to redo 2014 to date. Only four more years of posts to go!

So if you were wondering what I've been so busy with in recent weeks: this. And I'm afraid I'm far from finished fixing my fuck-up. One day, eh?

In the interim, I ask only for your patience, dear readers. That said, your sympathies wouldn't go amiss...

Book Review | Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his job as a web-designer and into a job working the night shift at Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. It is a curious shop with curious customers who wander in only to borrow obscure encoded volumes, all according to some arrangement with the mysterious Mr Penumbra. 

Intrigued and a little bored, Clay runs a computer analysis of the customers’ behaviour – and discovers that the dusty books and their dusty readers hold the key to a secret that stretches right back to when bookmaking began.

***

Have you ever felt the need to read? Been struck by the siren song of an awesome novel?

If you have — and I warrant we (you, reading this, and me) are well acquainted with this wonderful weakness — if you have, you'll know that it's one thing to want a book, but another to need one; to feel with every fibre of your being that you cannot be complete until you have swallowed the whole of some story.

For Clay Jannon, in his youth, the concluding volume of The Dragon-Song Chronicles fit the bill above, but in the years since the climax of said fictional fantasy saga, he hasn't felt so intensely about anything else. Not a book, not a woman, not a job — not nothing. Down on his luck at the outset of Robin Sloan's endearing if digressive debut, and hoping, perhaps, to recapture some of that passion, he applies for a job in a small bookshop in the Broadway district of San Francisco.

And that's all it takes. From the moment Clay crosses the threshold of Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, life is suddenly interesting again.

Inside: imagine the shape and volume of a normal bookstore turned up on its side. This place was absurdly narrow and dizzyingly tall, and the shelves went all the way up — three stories of books, maybe more. I craned my neck back [...] and the shelves faded smoothly into the shadows in a way that suggested they might go on forever. (pp.7-8)

In part, this puzzling new perspective rallies his passion — his need, indeed. And it isn't long before Clay realises there's something funny going on when it comes to Mr Penumbra's customers. That said, it's a stretch to even call them customers, because they don't buy books from the front of the store: rather, they rent them from its mysterious rear.

Clay's first thought is that these folks are part of an arcane lending library, and soon his curiosity gets the better of him: he breaks the first rule of this unusual book club, and looks at one of the musty old tomes. He doesn't find a story, but a code... and down the rabbit hole he goes!

What unfolds is a magnificent mystery, initially. An investigation into what Clay christens the Waybacklist and the readers evidently addicted to it. It isn't to give the game away to say they're actually code-crackers: initiates of an ancient order dedicated to the study of a puzzle which has gone unsolved for many centuries. Their promised reward for finally figuring out this riddle? No less than life eternal.

To followers of the order, this is practically "catnip: a code to be cracked and the key to immortality, all in one," (p.148) though Clay is less than convinced by its supernatural aspect:

"I don't believe the immortality part, but I do know the feeling that Penumbra is talking about. Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines — it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits. That's just a feeling, not a fact, but remember (I repeat): people believe weirder things than this." (p.147)

Which, sure, is true.

But Clay, needless to say, is a child of our time. The only things he really has faith in are his mobile phone and his MacBook, so of course he cannot resist applying contemporary tech to the old code Penumbra has dedicated his days to deciphering. This ambitious endeavour leads him to cross paths with Kat, who works for Google, and has at her fingertips resources equivalent to many million like minds.

I'm afraid this is where Sloan's first novel loses the larger part of its pull, because as soon as Google gets a look in, the narrative practically collapses. To a certain extent, the corporation's involvement helps to situate to strange amongst the true, lending credibility to the story's more incredible elements, but the trade-off is just too much. With every passing chapter, the central mystery becomes less magnetic.

Like The Shadow of the Wind, to which this text bears a deceptive resemblance, Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is at its very best when it taps into our love of literature — and at its very best, it is as remarkable a novel as Carlos Ruiz Zafon's first for adult audiences: a cryptic diptych, equally smart and sweet, warm and honest, esoteric, intriguing, and wonderfully witty.

Sadly, Sloan struggles to sustain the most effective elements of his debut, indulging instead in lengthy love letters to the aforementioned gods of tomorrow's technology — among a number of less distracting digressions. That said, these occur so often, and over the course of such a short novel, that an alarming proportion of the whole seems composed of packing peanuts; a miscellany of meaningless material that serves solely to pad out the plot of the laconic Kindle single I was unsurprised, ultimately, to learn Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore began as.

I wanted to love Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, and admittedly, there were bits of it I did, gathered around the outset especially. Additionally, Clay is a great narrator, and most of the story's supporting characters — Ajax and Kat and Mat — are as winning as him. The narrative, however, simply lacks substance... except, I suppose, as an ode to the enduring beauty of Google. And that's not what I come to my speculative fiction for, frankly.

***

Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore
by Robin Sloan

UK Publication: August 2013, Atlantic Books
US Publication: October 2012, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Recommended and Related Reading

Status Update | Reading After Reader

Well, today's the day. Google Reader is officially no more.

And you know what? I don't miss it one whit!

Many thanks to everyone who commented on last week's You Tell Me, or took to Twitter to advise me on my options. On Tuesday I started testing two of the recommended feed readers: Feedly and Bloglovin, with Netvibes and The Old Reader on standby if neither one worked out.

The trouble is, both did.

I'll say that Bloglovin seems like a great way to get your blog out there. To social network it a bit. But I'm a grumpy old man, and I begrudge social networking at best — hence my sporadic record on Twitter and Google Plus.

I suppose I gravitated more immediately towards Feedly, which I really appreciate the look and feel of — especially the tablet app... though I dare say it still has a way to go, and no widget support for the moment.

What sealed the deal for me, at the end of the day, was that I couldn't find an easy way to save or favourite single posts for later through Bloglovin, and that's an integral part of how I keep up to speed with the folks I follow.

So Feedly it is, I think. At least for the time being. If the widgets don't do what I want them to on the appointed day, perhaps I'll go back to Bloglovin, or take the temperature of the other options you all took the time to inform me of.

In conclusion, choice is awesome. Thanks again for reminding me of that, readers.

You Tell Me | RIP, Reader

One week from today, as part of their second annual spring cleaning, Google will retire their ubiquitous Reader.

I've known about this for months, and I still don't have a clue what I'm going to do!

Here's why Google are "sunsetting" the service:

We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too.  

There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.

Not for Google Reader users. Of which there must be more than a few; more than a few million, I'd imagine. Evidently that's a significantly smaller a number than it once was — and what does that say about blogs, I wonder? — but be that as it may, Google are set to stamp out something some of us, yours truly included, use every damn day.

First and foremost, Google Reader helps me keep track of all the blogs I follow, which I see now number in the hundreds. I also use it each week to organise the news stories I plan to talk about over the course of the British Genre Fiction Focus. I've never given Google a penny for the service, but I would have been well and truly willing to.

If they'd only asked! But Google don't do that, do they? And it's not like they need my pennies anyway.

Time, I think, to look on the bright side. To find a better alternative, because whether or not Google agrees, I need something to help me keep up to speed with all the shenanigans that happen when I'm otherwise occupied. And maybe this mystery service will be better than the nearly dearly departed product — which, let's face it, is at best pretty basic.

That's where you folks come in, fingers crossed, because I simply don't know where to start looking for a replacement feed reader. So please, you tell me!