I think that’s what we all go through in our 20s, 30s (and well, some even longer), especially as we finish university and start looking for a job and try to find more meaning in our lives. I could really relate to her thoughts in terms of wondering at being a part of something more something significant and important. Lois, the main character, is so full of life and energy.
Everything we eat tells a tale of ingenuity and creation, domination and injustice-and does so more vividly than any other artifact, any other medium. I have come to believe that food is history of the deepest kind. It doesn’t go into very fine details, which I didn’t mind because in a book like this, you can easily over-describe situations, events and processes until you bore your reader to death. What I liked about this book is that you can take it as lightly as you want to, but if you want to give it a bit more thought, there’s also some meat for you to chew on.
It also made me insanely hungry (2020 edit: reading that quote above already has me salivating!) and brought to life a craving for sourdough – although I’m sure the loaf that I dug into is nothing like the legendary Mazg one (unfortunately). I really enjoyed this book! Sourdough is full of quirky and endearing characters and situations that make you laugh and fill your mind with wonder. The sandwich was spicier still, thin-sliced vegetables slathered with a fluorescent red sauce, the burn buffered by thick slabs of bread artfully toasted. If Vietnamese pho’s healing powers, physical and psychic, make traditional chicken noodle soup seem like dishwater-and they do-then this spicy soup, in turn, dishwatered pho. But then, an alternative emerges: a secret market that aims to fuse food and technology.
When Lois comes before the jury that decides who sells what at Bay Area markets, she encounters a close-knit club with no appetite for new members. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens up. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms.
She must keep it alive, they tell her – feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighbourhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Magical Realism
0 kommentar(er)
