Lois is a software engineer, coding for a San-Francisco robotics company. She knows what she likes, what she is good at and achieves her goals. Lois is determined, persistent and focused on her work. She did what she thought was expected from her — graduated University, got her first job and then came the opportunity she couldn’t ignore — working in robotics for the iconic General Dexterity. She packed her bags, said goodbye to her family and moved to follow her new path. But with a higher-paid job and more responsibilities, ultimately came the side effects. She had no free time to eat and rest, and no human beings to talk to. Her only source of all the things above is the Clement Street spicy soup with sourdough bread and the two brothers on the other end of the phone. But once they have to leave, they hand her the dough starter and a CD of music in a language she doesn’t understand. And so her story begins.

Sourdough is a beautiful novel, one that you won’t want to put down. It charms you from the start and keeps you intrigued to the end. The simplicity of the characters, their likable nature and the quirky situations they find themselves in, and the magic of the sourdough starter fills your heart with joy. It’s a book I couldn’t find flaw with, it has the feel-good vibe, but not in a cliched way. Even with its surreal motives, it doesn’t read like a fantasy. Yes, the starter might be or might not be magical, but you believe in it. The novel takes you on a journey across cultures, ancient stories and the art of sourdough bread-making. The details are spot on and would inevitably make you see baking in a new light. Sourdough is to be tasted and life is to be appreciated.

We follow Lois on her quest to finding what truly makes her happy and what is worth living for. She is an example that we can change direction and find pleasant surprises on the way.

The sentences and writing style are joy to read, sweetly fitting the mood of the novel. Take it in one breath or indulge throughout time, do as you like, but I recommend you read it. Not everyday you can find a gem like that one in contemporary literature.

I have kindly received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in exchange of a fair review.

Imaginative and relatable, Sourdough rises to the occasion. I loved it: from start to finish, Lois' journey from beleaguered programmer to underground foodie neophyte is good, wholesome fun. I gobbled it up.

3.5/5 What a very odd book this is. Sourdough is fun and very odd, indeed. Lois Clary has moved from Michigan to the San Francisco area after accepting a challenging tech job - a job that becomes challenging enough that Lois begins to feel ill, look ill and fails to thrive. All of that changes one night when she sees a take out menu for a new restaurant. She orders "the double spicy" which comes with amazing sourdough bread. Lois is smitten. She begins to order it nightly and enjoys the phone call and delivery with the two brothers who make the magic happen. She's their "number one eater!" - a compliment- until the day they have to leave the country. They come to say goodbye and leave Lois with sourdough starter. Suddenly, Lois's life has changed. She is drawn to the magic of baking bread while still pursuing her tech career. Not weird yet, you say? No...that comes later. Goats, an alpaca, the guy who hasn't showered for a year, job offers from a restaurant. You'll have to find out for yourself. The book is a bit fantastical and definitely odd but a very fun read.

This book was sort of fascinating, sort of bizarre. Sloan has a lot to say (satirically) about Silicon Valley culture and foodie culture. This is a quick and easy read and one of those books that you can just enjoy for the story or do some serious thinking about. One of a kind.

The mention of sourdough bread conjures up a memory of hearths, homes, and warmth. Sourdough by Robin Sloan takes those images and places them in a post-modern futuristic world set in present day San Francisco Bay. The twists and turns in this book lead in some eccentric directions, but somehow it all works. The whole things is all together bizarre, but somehow it all forms a cohesive whole story I want to keep reading.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2017/10/sourdough.html

Reviewed for NetGalley.

Hilarious adventures of a geek meeting an unusual sourdough starter. Even a few bacteria can teach you great life lessons. Deliciously tasty.
I enjoyed so much Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, that when I saw Robin Sloan had a new book out, I jumped on it, without reading the synopsis. That’s what I do with authors I’ve really liked. As the title says it, Sourdough is no longer about books, but about bread! However, geeks and computers are still around!
Lois is definitely a geek. She is a programmer in a San Francisco robotic company and spends her life at her desk. So much so that she hardly has time to eat.
After a while, she gets tired of the nutritive gel her coworkers relish on, and she starts getting food from a local delivery service: bread and a delicious soup. Unfortunately, the 2 brothers running this small outfit are illegals and have to leave. As a gift to their best customer, they leave her their sourdough starter!
And a whole new adventure begins for Lois, especially as she discovers her starter has some very unusual behavior…
Now, if you have ever worked with a starter, you know that things are not easy, and you can easily become its slave, as you need to feed it so often. Lois has NO idea what she’s getting into, but committed as always, she starts reading books and even building her own wood-fired brick oven! It starts in a very messy way, as always…
the results are so delicious that everyone wants some of her bread. Which will lead Lois to join a very special market with innovative people.
I really enjoyed this quirky book, with its mix of food and technology, creativity, geekiness (yes, you can even teach a robotic arm to crack eggs and knead bread!) and health and happiness. For really, isn’t that what happens when you start baking your own bread?
The book is also about humility and finding balance in your life. Even something as simple as a bread starter can teach you a great lesson. Beware of the blob-like dangers if you go over board…
Some passages were totally hilarious, especially in that innovative market.

Sourdough : A Novel is the latest offering of Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore. It was quirky and entertaining and heartwarming, even if the plot and characters took some rather fantastical far-fetched turns in the later part of the novel. The setting is San Francisco with its unique cultural elements and denizens. And one of the main characters is a crock of sourdough starter! Yes, I know, that is a supposedly inanimate object, but in this novel the sourdough starter is a main character. For the non bakers out there, sourdough bread is made using a starter to rise the bread rather than yeast. Starters are quite alive, need to be fed each day, and many are famous for their historic provenance. They give the bread made from them a unique taste. This crock of sourdough starter inadvertently becomes the main companion in the life of a lonely young software engineer named Lois Clary. Lois works long hours for an innovative robotics company named General Dexterity— so long that she barely takes time to eat much less have a social life. She ended up there kind of by accident leaving family and a perfectly reasonable job in Michigan behind when she was suddenly recruited by the tech people. Why did she take the job? One she doesn’t particularly enjoy? Here are Lois’ words from the novel: “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." At any rate Lois inherits the starter because she is the “number one eater” of a takeout run by two immigrant brothers who leave town unexpectedly. She learns how to make her own bread, starts to sell it, and gets caught up in the foodie and farmer’s market culture of San Francisco. This book is full of quirky characters and is a simple story of someone’s life taking a turn for the better on one level, but is also rather allegorical on another level making a statement about our busy modern lives and our rush to simplify and automate them. Thank you MCD/ Farrah, Strauss Giroux and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader’s Copy and for allowing me to review this book.

Odd but enchanting, Sloan's Sourdough is a rhapsody to bread and teaching oneself a craft.

This was a really good read. Yes, it was somewhat cheesy, but cheese goes good with bread. Ha!

A story of a woman, Lois, whose life makes a big change when she moves from Michigan to San Francisco to work at a tech company coding programs for robots. The new company sounds like a Google workplace with free food and beds which keep the employees there way after hours.

Lois has no friends other than those few at work and spends most of her time at the company. She finds a menu for a new restaurant, a whole in the wall, and starts ordering from them. It ends up that she orders from them so much that the brother who own it call her "Number one Eater".

Then the brothers Visa expires and they give Lois a going away present. Their starter for the Sourdough bread that they made.

This makes a big change in Lois' life and all for the better. A little sappy towards the end - yes, this is the cheesy part - but a very enjoyable read.

And yes, I looked it up, there is a "Lois Club". I didn't find any Debbie clubs, however. Ha!

Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Net Galley for providing me with a free e-galley in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

Published by MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux on Sept. 5, 2017

Sourdough is partly about connections that join the past, present and future. The novel explores food as a connecting force, in the form of cultural migration of foods and recipes that are handed down through generations. The novel suggests “food is history of the deepest kind,” a record of both tradition and evolution as tastes and mechanisms of production have changed from decade to decade, stretching back to "the dawn of hunger." Food also connects people and cultures in the present, at least for those who are gastronomically adventurous and open to the world.

The way we eat has also evolved (changes in packaging and the development of interstate highways created fast food in the 1950s) and that evolution continues as consumers embrace (for example) organic alternatives to processed foods. But evolution can bring about drastic change. Robin Sloan imagines a food product called Slurry that provides all of the body’s nutritional needs. It’s all anyone needs to eat and it’s so much healthier than potato chips. It can feed the world if people don’t mind eating goo, and it is inexpensive to produce. Feeding the world is undeniably a worthy goal, but nutrition without pleasure is a tough choice to make.

Sourdough’s central character, Lois Clary, is a programmer in a robotic industry who is on a mission to replace manual workers, but the demanding work ties her stomach in knots. Only a specific soup and sandwich combo from a delivery service can relax her, but the place operates illegally and is soon out of business. Luckily for Lois, however, the owners have dubbed her their “number one eater” and make a gift to her of their special starter for sourdough bread. It is, they say, a part of their culture (they are Mazg from some mysterious part of the world that Lois cannot identify). Unlike any other starter, this one carves a recognizable face into the crust of each loaf. The face depends on the music that is playing as the bread rises.

Lois lives in ultramodern San Francisco, doing an ultramodern high tech job, but her newfound ability to make sourdough, her “serendipity bread,” provides her with a connection to a task that countless people have performed for generations. She also finds a connection to the bread itself when she ponders the living organism that changes flour into bread. The story’s point might be that Lois, who as a programmer is working to make repetitive labor obsolete, finds greater satisfaction in the repetitive labor of baking bread.

Yet Sourdough does not reject the inevitability of change. The novel is also an appreciation of imaginative, science-based food. Lois joins a cross between a farmer’s market and a food fair that hosts people who take an experimental, edgy approach to food production. The chapter that describes “Lembas cakes manufactured whole by living organisms” and “algorithmically optimized bagels” and cookies made from bugs made me want to visit the place.

But the novel might also send the message that technology is no match for nature. I thoroughly enjoyed Sloan’s descriptions of the wars that bacteria fight, the extent to which they work together to defeat enemies and achieve common goals, and the ability of humans to benefit from those wars when they bake bread. The descriptions of bacteria engaged in a clash of civilizations might seem fanciful at first blush, but the novel opens up a microscopic world to the reader’s imagination in a way that rings true.

There are people who embrace the past and fear the future. There are people who embrace the future and reject the past. The ultimate point of Sourdough might be that the past and future coexist, that it is possible to embrace them both in the present. All by thinking about bread.

The novel’s plot is engaging, its characters are fittingly quirky, and its ending is endearingly whimsical. As a work of philosophy, food history, or just entertainment, I cannot find any fault in Sourdough.

RECOMMENDED

I enjoyed this book so much. Loved the way the protagonist (Lois) developed from a unidimensional character to a creative, problem-solving character. Also loved the correspondence between her and the person who first gave her the sort of magical sourdough starter. What a journey - through the San Francisco area.

[3.5 stars]

Sourdough is a quirky book melding the technology and food (baking, to be exact) worlds. I was immediately interested in the story and Lois, the main character. She receives a sourdough “starter” as a gift and dives headfirst into the art of bread baking as an escape from her soul-crushing computer coding job.

Sloan had me feeling actual emotions towards the starter itself…almost as if it was a human character. I was rooting for it like it was a sports team and I was thrilled about this!

BUT…literally a few pages later, he made the starter sing. I first thought this was an exaggerated way to describe a realistic sucking or bubbling sound a starter could make. But, then he started comparing it to actual music. And, had it make faces. And, pit it against another starter as if it were an American Gladiator competition. Wha?! Too much. Who thought this was a good idea?

*For me, the starter’s over-the-top antics didn’t fully torpedo this book. I still enjoyed it and would recommend it to others, I just could have done without the eye roll-inducing moments.

ORIGINALLY POSTED: https://bibliomantics.com/2017/09/11/...

Robin Sloan's new story claims to do for food what Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore did for books, and it definitely lives up to that promise. Dare I say it even surpasses it? Sourdough follows Lois, an overworked software engineer at a robotics company whose life is changed forever when she is gifted with a sourdough starter. Thanks to her seemingly impossible bread, which needs music to thrive, Lois and her newfound love of baking are quickly whisked into the world of the San Francisco food scene where adventures and magical realism abound.

This book started painfully slow for me and initially I was disappointed, expecting great things after Sloan's first book. If anyone else experiences the same thing, keep going. You're in for a ride!

Lois Cleary is a computer programmer and comes to San Francisco after being head hunted. But the exhausting and demanding hours don't allow for any thought to what to eat so she and many of her fellow employees turn to a liquid but nutritious diet. And then she calls a phone number she found on a flyer to order food and stumbles into a whole new world of sourdough bread and the brothers who give her with their sourdough starter when they don't get renewed visas and have to leave the country.

The book is many story threads that effortlessly grow and braid together. I have been a bread baker most of my life and my mother before me so I took a particular shine to this. "The King Arthur flour company began as a Boston-based importer in 1790 and introduced it's own American grown wheat flour in 1896. Since 2004, it's been 100 percent employee-owned, which is pretty cool." I've used their flour and totally did not know this, didn't think to inquire.

Lois stayed in touch by email with Boz, the benefactor of the starter. He unravels the story of its origin, one email at a time, and Lois after buying a starter from King Arthur, realizes the Clement Street starter is not normal, and in fact, she sees its strangeness when she compares it to the King Arthur starter she purchased which was very normal, like a happy dopey big brown dog.

The starter is the star strange character but the strange character cast is huge including the computer arm she programmed to mix the dough. Don't we all want one of those?! This is a completely new story from an already successful author of another strange story.

September has already been a month of heavy (literally) reading. Namely, Ken Follett’s latest, which clocked in at a daunting 928 pages. It is one of those times when I have loved having an e-book because I have a tendency to fall asleep in bed while reading and a book like that could have broken my nose. It’s not just literal, though, it’s been a month of heavy reading based on somber subjects as well so it was not only a relief but an absolute delight to stumble into Robin Sloane’s newest novel, Sourdough. And yes, it is a novel that rises around bread…sorry, could not resist that one. Lois is a programmer for a young company in San Francisco that produces robotic arms with the aim to eliminate repetitive motion problems in factories and laboratories. Sadly, the work itself is repetitive—reviewing and creating lines and lines of code. She’s only in her early twenties but when she is able to go home from work she already feels as if

…I existed in a state of catatonic recovery, brain flaccid, cells gasping. Loc 114

Things change for Lois when she finds a flyer for a soup delivery company. Prior to this she had moved from solid food to a product called Slurry that many of her colleagues at General Dexterity lived on, because who has time to buy food and prepare it? She orders and with her wonderful, spicy soup comes a slice of bread unlike any she has ever eaten before. It satiates her, gives her energy, but lets her relax and sleep when she needs to. She becomes obsessed until it is all she eats and then…? Then the men who make it decide to leave San Francisco. They are brothers—one makes the soup and bread and one delivers it.  They are Mazg, a small ethnic group of unknown origin, but with a lot of interesting history. Because Lois is their Number One Eater, Beoreg (the baker) gifts her his sourdough starter which has been in their family for generations. Lois’s journey into the world of baking begins and Sourdough starts expanding into charming and unexpected places.

Just as delicious alchemy occurs in the best starters so too does Sloan make it happen in Sourdough. He surrounds Lois with characters who complement her and even if their role is small, they add to the overall flavor of the novel. There are the women who comprise the Lois Club—yes, a club of women named Lois, the various artisans at the market where Lois sells her bread, and, even though it is through email only, Beo, the man who gave her the starter. His messages to her are a window into the mysterious world of the Mazg and give her encouragement.

If every single slice of Sourdough’s plot doesn’t quite wrap up at the end, it’s all right. Sloan moves into the slightly mystical world of food artisans and so starter that responds to music and cheese with molds and fungi that conquer other microorganisms doesn’t seem odd. For those that treat their food with reverence it’s not surprising to read about the materials that make up food as having the same life force as human beings. For someone like me, it’s much needed whimsy after novels about racism, deprivation, and religious persecution. Like the bread itself, Sourdough is simple and satisfying.

Sourdough is intelligent and entertaining (similar to the bread)! AND it made me want to get in the kitchen and create something magical.

Robin Sloan gives readers the perfect follow up to Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. He gives us a great look at San Francisco foodie world, a protagonist working on finding herself, and a pretty much happy ending. The perfect read to put a smile on your face (and maybe on your bread!).

Sourdough is quirky, a little bit odd, and I kind of loved it. The plot did take a left turn into decidedly weird when Lois gets into the Marrow market, and I wasn't quite as in love with the story from then on, but all in all it was a fun book.

*ARC via netgalley*

Sloan returns to familiar territory with his second novel set in San Fransisco. Like the hidden worlds of Penumbra, Sloan finds hidden worlds in the underground food market. I don't know if Sloan is thinking of these books in terms of a trilogy, but if he is the first two books will be difficult to top.