Sourdough

This was a delightful read from start to finish. Firmly rooted in a future not too far from now with just enough whimsy to keep me guessing. A must read for lovers of the Bay Area, gluten, and food in general.

A very cute story with a relatively high number of references to farts and also a happy ending.

This was fun! I would highly recommend it, especially to anyone interested in programming, robots, and especially baking / bread / food in general. It will make you hungry. So many great quotes and engaging characters. “Here's a thing I believe about people my age: we are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted.” Ha!

One small thing that bugged me - there are a couple of points where they make fun of radiation - as in the location of their market is located in an old military facility that previously housed nuclear weapons, and at one point Lois is offered honey supposedly from “Chernobyl,” and eats it without batting an eye. The characters reactions to this are along the lines of “Eh, mutation is good for you...” Which was so weird, considering that unless this book was in a superhero universe, radiation would actually poison and kill you. Super minor, especially considering this book is basically about magical bacteria cultures.

This was an interesting read.

Can't say I've read something like this before, but also I'm not sure it's for everyone. Needless to say, I kept thinking about this weeks after finishing it.

You follow this woman as she “lives” her mundane life without any sort of excitement. She sleeps, goes to work, eats this energy-protein-mix to sustain herself, and repeats. It's only after she orders delivery from two brothers that everything changes for her. She starts a new hobby, she makes friends with them, she starts to think about new career choices, and she stopped drinking that f*ing sht.

Somehow, we find ourselves rooting for her, but then the story takes some “liberties” that could be interpreted as “magical realism”. Cutting it short, there's a point in the novel that (well, actually it was foreshadowed in the emails exchanged between the protagonist and the eldest of the brothers) catches you by surprise a little, but you just roll with it. Then something else happens, and you're like, “what?” in the surreal kind of way. Yet, I personally also rolled with it, even if I still can't accept certain characters disgustingly got away with somethings.

In the end, there's a lesson to be learned here (like with every book), but I feel this one only displays to the one who reads it; I feel the author quoted Rick Sanchez on this one: “There's a lesson here and I'm not going to be the one to figure it out”.

A delightful, sweet, smart fantasy. Snappy first-person narration, clever but not pretentious. Surprisingly nerdy, in very good ways: Sloan truly gets nerdiness, the need to find and solve challenges. He also gets startups, and baking, and the search for meaning. He has a gift for absurdity. I was reminded of Carl Hiaasen a few times, but without the violence and with much, much more self-awareness, delicious tender thoughtful curiosity and discovery.

You will need to suspend disbelief. Not the singing, sentient sourdough—I’m totally ok with that—it’s the time management. How the protagonist manages a startup job and baking and everything else, that’s a bit of a stretch! But I was ok with that, too, in the satisfying end.

Very fun. A book that kept me smiling and laughing and invested the whole read.

I wasn't sure if I'd like this book since I enjoyed Mr. Penumbra so much, but I was delighted by the fun world building this book brought to life. I also adore books about the Bay Area, and this one really did the area justice.

20th May 2022:


I don't think a book ever made me this happy while reading it. I love the monologues and observations, they were absolutely hilarious. But the one thing that didn't made it for me was the ending. I wanted a something a bit more. It felt like the author couldn't see a way to go ahead so it felt like a cop out. 

Nevertheless I enjoyed what I enjoyed. 

Final rating: 4/5 stars

★ ★ ★ ★ 1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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There's a version of this where all I do is talk about how this is similar to/different from Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore – but I don't want to do that. Let me just say up front that if you liked Mr. Penumbra's, you'll dig this. If you didn't like it, you will dig this – and you probably were having a bad day or weren't paying attention when you read Mr. Penumbra's (or you were created by the Tyrell Corporation). So let me sum up: you will dig this book.

This is the story of Lois Clary, a computer programmer working on ways to help robots redefine the concept of work for the future. It sounds like a dreadful place to work – intellectually rewarding, maybe; challenging, yes; but between the hours, the pay and the culture? No thanks. The work is demanding enough that they don't have time to eat/prepare food, many using Slurry, “a liquid meal replacement,” for several meals each week.

Slurry was a nutritive gel manufactured by an eponymous company even newer than [the company Lois works for]. Dispensed in waxy green Tetra Packs, it had the consistency of a thick milkshake. It was nutritionally complete and rich with probiotics. It was fully dystopian.

Sourdough

Four stars for this very, very strange little book.

A synopsis first: Lois is a software engineer at loose ends. She works day and night at a company that makes robots. Every night she orders dinner at the same place, and it is amazing. The two brothers who make the dinners have to leave town fast, and when they do, they leave Lois their sourdough starter. Lois starts to bake...and bake...and bake....

Odd things about this book:
(1) The sourdough must have music to thrive.
(2) Lois belongs to a Lois Club made up of people named Lois.
(3) Lois builds a robot arm to help her make bread.
(4) There is a secret market combining food and technology. Lois is invited to become part of it.
(5) The brothers.

Yes, an odd book, but a strangely satisfying one.

Sloan's has a fun voice and his writing is full of sly pop culture references. Most of which I'm sure I missed. I enjoyed this one more than “Penumbra”, though I feel it was a little rushed at the end. I do have a sudden desire to go learn how to bake bread.

This is one heck of a unique novel. Centered around food and baking, it's also a bit futuristic and strangely magical.

Our main character is Lois, a young, gifted software programmer who has just moved to California to work at a company that programs robotic arms to do various jobs. She moves from a slow life in Michigan to a world of long days in an office, surviving on quick bites in between work. She's been trying Slurry, a sort of nutritional meal-replacement paste, to supplement her diet. Until, that is, a new restaurant opens up very close to her apartment called Clement Street Soup and Sourdough. She falls in love with their bread and soup so much that she orders nearly every night, and is soon called their “Number One Eater”.

When the guys who run the restaurant inform her that they're moving away, she's not happy. They show up at her door and hand her something to keep as a gift: some of their sourdough starter.

It's here that the story moves into strange gastronomic territory. The starter creates loaves of bread that seem to have faces in them, and it seems to sing at times. Lois's bread becomes well-loved, and she finds a way to combine both her career and her new love of sourdough baking. She finds camaraderie in a strange gathering of people in an underground farmer's market of sorts, where science is just as much a part of food as the ingredients are.

Although far-fetched at times, Sourdough is a foodie novel unlike any other I've read before, and I liked it. I've been wanting to start my own sourdough starter for some time, and after reading this book, I went for it. As I type up this review, it's growing and bubbling in my kitchen. Our relationship to food is so fascinating, and I thought this book explored that relationship in a really unique way: with a little magic.

Read the rest of my review here: http://www.literaryquicksand.com/2018/01/review-sourdough/

There's something brewing throughout this book and it explodes at the end. It's not what you think when you read it. It starts out puppy dog and ends.... Weird.

Overall I SO enjoyed the story. I would have not done what the author did in the second half -it's not bad, just kind of funky- but it's not my story so he can obviously do whatever he wants.

A word to the wise: if you read this you WILL want to bake again like it's spring 2020 and you WILL eat a lot of bread- make sure it's good. Enjoy!

a lovely little pocket of magical realism that takes place in a future barely five minutes away. also gave me an intense craving for sourdough bread.

This was a very pleasant surprise, it's a quick and entertaining read about a young programmer who comes into the possession of a sourdough starter and subsequently figures out how to bake, how to build an baking oven and then enters the SF food and tech scene. There's a Soylent stand-in named Slurry. The right mix of fun and geeky.

I absolutely love quick feel good stories with some quirkiness, so that's why I picked this book up. IT WAS SO GOOD!! I loved the entire thing. This was the perfect palate cleanser because I have been bogged down in a giant fantasy book. Sourdough is so lighthearted but encouraging with so much emotional depth. Robin Sloan has definitely become a new favorite.

Delightful fairytale of starters (sourdough) and startups. Listened to this one and enjoyed it thoroughly.

I picked this up because the author's first book is one of my favorites. The topic is very different, so I was skeptical.

However, there was no need for skepticism though. Mr. Sloan approached the new topic with the same vision of the world as in Mr. Penumbra. Again we are in San Francisco with a young tech saavy person looking for their place in the world.

Lois is discovering that coding and robots might not be her place. She discovers a small restaurant run by two brothers who we discover are part of a little known ethnic group. They leave Lois with their sourdough culture and she is catapulted into an adventure that includes an almost unreal group of food experimentalists. She eventually uncovers her thing even though it almost ruined her.