I haven’t posted since last September. I haven’t posted a book review since November 2020. The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. That’s the last book I read. Writing that out makes me a little sad. I tried, picked different things up, I couldn’t finish anything until now. Sourdough by Robin Sloan is just that good.
Is it that good? Yes, yes it is. I read his first novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24 hr Bookshop during undergrad, which was more years then I realized now that I count. (Eight years?) I loved it, even bought copies for a few friends. How I missed Sourdough is a question I have decided not to spend too long puzzling out. I’m glad I did though. It might have taken another year to find a book to get me out of the slump – another book that was just that good.
Sourdough is at its base a coming of age story.
Lois Clary is a software engineer who has left everything she knows behind in the midwest to work at San Fransisco start up with civilization changing ambitions. Going from a work culture where everyone left exactly at five, to offices with couches large enough to sleep on, and drink their meals from post apocalyptic vacuum packs. She’s adrift. Not that she recognizes it as being adrift.
With out an intervention Lois would have gone on that way indefinitely: programing; drinking her meals; disconnected from positive human connections. Instead, a menu appears. Tucked into her door offering a small selections from a new take away. A menu with out an address, only a telephone number in a strange font. Slowly she makes friends with the brothers that run the tiny take away where she gets her double spicy. Then just as startlingly as they arrived, with a menu on the door, they’re gone.
They have taken their delicious food, and left. All that remains in their wake is the memory of food that made her feel like a human, and a small gift. A starter that will lead her on an odyssey through San Fransisco’s food scene. At once a love story to the history of food culture, and to the future of food culture. A future both terrifying, and a little interesting.
I wont deny that it’s a little bit of weird. It is. Maybe a little bit more, then a little bit, but lord is it good.
