FINDING A GOOD BOOK is one thing.  Finding a creator is almost completely different.  This past weekend, I found both.

A glance at an ad in the latest issue of The Believer led me to the new fiction section of Barnes & Nobles.  A blurb on Seth Godin’s website the next morning confirmed my hope: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore was just the thing I needed for a holiday-weekend read.  About 2/3 of the way through the book I finally researched the author, Robin Sloan.

Sloan calls himself “a writer and a media inventor.”  What’s that last thing?  “Media inventors aren’t satisfied with the suite of formats available to them by default . . . media inventors feel compelled to make the content and the container.”  I like that . . . a lot.  I’m curious to see where Sloan and his ilk line up with the likes of McLuhan and Coupland (critics and creators of media).

I highly encourage you to get a copy of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.  Sloan has an interesting iPhone “tap essay” called “Fish” that I found intriguing.  You can download it for free here.  And he has a load of interesting stuff on his website, which you can visit here.  I’ll have more to say about Sloan’s novel later.  For now I’ll say this: it’s a great, intriguing read.