"Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore", "The Race Underground"

[fiefoe]

More audiobooks. Fiction vs. non; new tech now vs. new tech back then.

Robin Sloan's bookish romp is an ode to Google and big data. There's a bit of a bro-grammer vibe, (featuring Ruby of course.) The villain is pretty weak-sauce.

• Cat's micromuscles are very attractive.
• I'm very attracted to girls who can impressed with a prototype.
• "Oh I'm very familiar with the internal monologue."
• scientology for bookish old people
• Penumbra's cult runs on outrange (typeface) licensing fees.
• Universal museum acsension tables are... the Bloomberg terminal of antiquity.
• I'm starting to think that the whole wide world is a patchwork of little secreat cults.

_______________________________

Doug Most doesn't spare us the nitty-gritty of construction, which is welcome, but the narrative never quite soared. The Whitney brothers' roles in building subways in their respective cities were somewhat overstated in the prologue.

Things that left an impression:

• the down-to-the-wire struggles to build an electrified street car system in Richmond VA
• Boss Tweed's viaduct plan (lightrail!) vs. Mr. Alfred Beach (of Scientific American fame)'s pneumatic subway (which charter was obtained under the disguise of doing pneumatic mail.)
• Brunel, chief engineer for NYC, forged his own passport under official eyes to get into the country.
• Mr. Steinway's involvement with New York's transportation committee
• mapping the complex underground topography in Manhattan