Robin Sloan’s Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore is a great example that coincides with Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor. He accomplishes that with sex, politics, and a quest. During Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore, the main character Clay goes on a quest with his friends, Neel and Kat, along with his boss, Mr. Penumbra, to figure out the secret, hidden in books, to immortality. Throughout the course of the book, Sloan uses several tactics that go along with the points in Foster’s book as well. Foster, in the book, states, “for those who remember a time when the movies not only didn’t showed people ‘doing it’, they also didn’t show people having done it or talking about having done it… director cuts to waves, somebody was getting lucky.” (p.143) He meant that in the movie business or in literature, people wouldn’t bring suck up and if sex was going to happen, they showed something else. Sloan states, during Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore, “I push up her T-shirt and …show more content…
For example, Foster’s thoughts include a trip as simple as going to the supermarket being a quest. There are 5 parts to a quest that include the following: our questor, a place to go, a reason for going, challenges and trials, and then the real reason to go. Through each step, our questor will get to the end goal which is always self knowledge. In Sloan’s book, Clay goes on the quest for the secret to immortality. Sloan states, “thank you teobaldo, you are my greatest friend this has been the key to everything.” (p. 277) This was the final line of the coded message. The answer to immortality was friendship. This revolution in itself was Clay’s self knowledge, but he also realized who his true friends are and who weren’t i.e. Kat. This proves that the two books match because again Foster’s ideas and literary techniques match with Sloan’s writing