Sourdough

There is a specific kind of friction that occurs when the sterile, optimized world of software meets the messy, aerobic reality of organic life. Sloan captures this tension perfectly through Lois Clary, a coder whose life in San Francisco is a series of "user-friendly" voids, until a sentient, singing sourdough starter arrives in her kitchen.

What struck me most wasn't just the whimsical plot, but the way Sloan treats the act of baking as a form of structural engineering. There’s a beautiful rhythm to the descriptions of the Mazg brothers’ bread, it feels less like a recipe and more like a rediscovered folk song or a blueprint for a lost cathedral. He manages to bridge the gap between the hyper-modern (the robotic arms Lois programs) show more and the ancient (the microbial alchemy of fermentation) without ever making the contrast feel forced.

The "secret market" subplot felt a bit like a fever dream, part Bauhaus workshop, part medieval guild, but it serves as a wonderful critique of our current obsession with "disruption." It asks whether we are actually building anything of substance, or if we’re just optimizing the soul out of our daily bread.

I found myself thinking about the concept of provenance. In a world of Soylent and sleek glass offices, the starter is an intrusive, bubbling reminder that history has a scent and a sound. It’s a slim, bright novel that understands that the most interesting things usually happen at the intersection of the grid and the curve.

Highly recommended for anyone who finds themselves looking at a piece of software and a well-crusted baguette and seeing the same kind of intricate, underlying logic. show less

"I needed a more interesting life.
I could start by learning something.
I could start with the starter." Lois Clary

Lois Clary, freshly transplanted to San Francisco, is too busy in her new position as software programmer at General Dexterity to fix a decent dinner. What does an up and coming professional do? Order out, of course! She has the good fortune of discovering Clement Street Soup and Sourdough. Their double spicy soup sopped up with their delicious homemade bread quickly becomes her daily staple. When the owners are forced to leave San Francisco, they gift their Sourdough starter to their "Number One Eater", Lois, with the stipulation she must feed it, talk to it and play music for it as it is alive. The starter opens a new world show more to Lois and as the starter expands so do her bread baking skills, taking her life in a new direction.
Seventy-Five percent of this book was enthralling. It read as if it were a memoir or a non-fiction self-help book on starting your own business with interesting tidbits on the science of sourdough bread. The final 25% of the story declined with its absurd silliness and seemed rushed ultimately falling as flat as untended starter. show less

Who ever would have thought I'd find a book about a woman baking Sourdough bread absolutely charming?!

(After reading this, I discovered uBiome and now I'm convinced that Robin Sloan must read the same science-y news sites as Margaret Atwood because how do they KNOW THESE RANDOM SCIENCE-Y THINGS?!)

Sourdough is an odd book - full of futuristic ideas, but stays firmly on the ground. Its also a love story, to food, to San Fransisco, and to Technology, but its also a cautionary tale, of messing with nature, but also assuming it can be tamed.

Robin Sloan writes books that border on dystopian, but also on the border of the best of what humanity can offer, and without being overly saccharine. In Sourdough, we have a computer programmer working for a company that aims to free humanity of dull repetitive work, while herself becoming similar to a robot drone in the process. A chance encounter with the food of the Mazg, brings her to a love of sourdough, and a deeper understanding of flow of action and flow of thought.

There aren't really show more any villains in this book, and its a rather gentle proto-dystopian, in that technology is needed, but nature can go wild when humans try to tame it. As a cautionary tale, it hits that sweet spot of optimistic, but be careful. show less

Lois Clary is a young software programmer in San Francisco who spends all her time working on a robotic arm that can “end work.” The development effort, ironically, involves “a shit ton of work.” The company’s biggest challenge is getting the arm to do delicate work like breaking an egg; the “egg problem” is their holy grail.

Lois mostly eats and even sleeps at the office, but is “saved,” as she explains it, by Clement Street Soup and Sourdough. This small take-out run by two immigrant brothers quickly turns Lois into their “number one eater.” Their spicy soup is addictive to her, as is their wonderful sourdough bread.

Lois orders so much from the brothers that when they have visa problems and have to leave the show more country, they ask her to take custody of their sourdough starter and keep it alive. She buys a book on baking sourdough bread, builds an oven in her tiny backyard, and starts to bake bread. She also gets regular advice from one of the brothers, Beoreg, via email. Before long she has been accepted as a vendor at an experimental food market in Alameda called the Marrow Fair, on the condition she bring a robot arm with her to attract customers.

The bread made by the brothers' starter is unique not only for its taste, but because the bread loaves have faces. As Lois explains:

“It was an illusion, of course. Jesus Christ in an English muffin. It’s called pareidolia. Humans see faces in everything.”

But, as she allowed, the illusion was compelling, and before long, her bread business literally gets out of control.

The robot arm turns out to be a godsend, because Lois’s bread is so popular she needs extra help, especially since she is still working full-time at the software company. The arm provides the labor. Moreover, when the baking is done, she has the arm right there to continue her work on the egg problem.

The new venture opens up Lois's world: she makes friends and expands her horizons. Suddenly new options for the direction of her life are on the table, and Lois realizes she must make a decision.

Evaluation: This short little satire ribbing both foodies and techies has lots of unexpected humorous touches, such as the Lois Club that the protagonist joins - a group with chapters in numerous cities for women named Lois. But be warned: I was digging out recipes for sourdough bread by about the third chapter, and couldn’t rest until I had made a fresh loaf slathered with butter hot out of the oven! show less

Reviews for Sourdough were more mixed than for Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, but it's much the same style and similarly diverting and delightful. It's also set in San Francisco, and also mixes the realistic (if the cutting-edge tech world of San Francisco can be called realistic) with the slightly paranormal or magical realist: in this case, a pair of brothers who say they are of the Mazg people, who run a restaurant out of their apartment, and who possess a sourdough starter that is unlike any other - for one thing, loaves of bread baked with the starter have faces in their crusts.

Lois Clary is from Michigan, wooed to San Francisco to work on the propioception team at General Dexterity, programming robot arms to do human tasks. But show more when the Mazg brothers leave town, they leave her their starter ("culture") and ask her to take care of it. In this way, mysterious phenomena aside, Lois learns about baking, and the satisfaction that comes from creating something physical (and edible). Lois brings her bread into the world: to work, where Chef Kate offers to pay her for a supply; to the Lois Club ("do other names have clubs?"); and eventually to the farmers' market tryout, where she doesn't win a place at a traditional market but does get invited to a semi-secret, literally underground market in Alameda. There, Lois and her robot bake bread and get to know the others at the market, including Horace the librarian and Jaina Mitra, who is working on creating nutritionally complete Lembas cakes. All the while, Lois e-mails with Beo, though the reader only sees his end of the correspondence (presumably because we're getting Lois' side of things already).

A plot filled with advanced technology, food culture, the (invented) history/mythology of the (invented) Mazg people, a secret benefactor ("Mr. Marrow"), and more advanced tech, all navigated by problem-solving Lois - Sourdough is wonderful. (And I really loved the idea of a Lois club - those short scenes were fun.)

Quotes

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. (5)

In every legend of the underworld, there is the same warning: Don't eat the food. Not before you know what's happening and/or what bargain you're accepting. (101)

My disgruntlement dissolved on contact with the problem, the way it had hundreds of times at Crowley and General Dexterity. Maybe that was my great weakness: if a task was even mildly challenging, any sense of injustice drained away and I simply worked quietly until I was done. (106)

We passed through a tunnel of memory in a bubble of light. (137)

"Lois, it is a lazy thing not to know whose world you live in. This is Charlotte Clingstone's." (Horace to Lois, 140)

I felt the disorientation of a generous offer that in no way lines up with anything you want to do: like a promotion to senior alligator wrestler, or an all-expenses-paid trip to Gary, Indiana. (190) show less

'Sourdough' works (see what I did there?) on a lot of levels -- it's a satire that deftly skewers the high-tech startup culture and zings "California cuisine" along with various other pretensions; it's a love poem to the amazing, frustrating, dynamic presence of the organic lifeform known as sourdough starter; it's the tale of a young woman realizing there's more to life than coding computer language 12 hours a day; and it's a magical-realism romp where high tech and high magic collide head-on and the mushroom shape rising over Alameda is not nuclear in nature.

Lois Clary is a simple Minnesota girl lured out to Babylon-by-the-Bay for a high-dollar job in a tech startup company with the modest goal of replacing human labor with robots. show more She sinks into it like a raisin into oatmeal, living, breathing, sleeping, and eating at a computer console, eschewing social contact, and existing on a "nutritional gel" called Slurry (whose name alone would be enough to put off most people). Her only human contact, in fact, is with the phone voice and delivery man from a local deli, who begin providing her with an amazing soup and sandwich combo. When the deli is forced to close, the owner presents her with a crock of the restaurant's sourdough starter, along with the basic equipment and instructions to bake her own version of the bread.

And things get ... interesting ... from that point onward. From Lois' investigations into the history and practice of breadmaking (sourdough subset) to making new friends (and ultimately opening up another career path) via her fragrant, crusty loaves, to discovering a literal underground artisanal market intent on completely revolutionizing food production, to trying to deal with an increasingly cranky and uncooperative starter, things get more and more surreal.

Light-hearted, crunchy, fragrant, and dripping with fun, this is a book to be savored in one sitting. show less