Sourdough Review

This week's novel was Sourdough by Robin Sloan.  It's magical realism (kind of) about bread.  This was a Goodreads Choice Nominee and NPR's Best Books of 2017, so that's how I heard about it.

Lois is a software engineer at a Type-A robot arm company, if companies can be described as Type-A.  She has a favorite take out place, run by two brothers who are ambiguously foreign.  The takeout place is delivery only and has basically one item on their menu, the double spicy, which is a spicy soup and a sandwich on sourdough bread.  When Lois starts eating the double spicy every night, she starts feeling better about her life, as if the bread has magical properties that can lift her spirits.  When the takeout guys are forced to leave the country, they leave her with their sourdough starter and a CD of the music of their people.  Lois figures out how to bake bread, and discovers that the starter glows at night, sings the music of their people, and makes bread with a crust that looks ominously like a human face.

I loved this book, you guys.

Sourdough starters are naturally weird, and pushing them into the realm of magical is not too much of a stretch.  But the book makes it seem like maybe there's a rational explanation for the starter's behavior.  There are experts in microbe colonies sprinkled throughout the book who have scientific explanations for why it acts that way, but it's always ambiguous as to if they just don't understand how whacky the starter is or if the ominous nature of the starter is all in Lois's head. 

In fact, I really like how science and magic work together in this book.  I went in expecting Lois to turn away from her soul crushing programming job to move to the country and bake bread in a brick oven she built herself.  That never happens, because Lois' love for technology, and how good she is at her job are a part of her.  Just like how baking comes to be a part of her.  I really appreciate how the two can live together instead of them working against each other, instead of the book ultimately coming out as a condemnation of technology.

I also really liked the ambiguously foreign brothers.  Turns out they were deported to Edinburgh.  They are Mazg, which is a group of people who relocate frequently and don't have restaurants with signs and tables and don't mix their own music to dubstep beats, because they're "second floor people" who remain mostly anonymous.  The two brothers have some tension about this, because they want to share the music and food of their yeast based culture with the world.  They share stories of the Mazg, which are familiar and yet yeast based.

There really isn't that much of a plot to this.  There's no bad guy trying to steal the starter or use the sourdough for nefarious purposes.  No one is pushing Lois to give up technology and be a baker, or to quit baking and get back to work.  The big conflict at about 2/3 of the way through is how Lois is going to feed the starter enough to make enough bread to meet demand.  But it's so enjoyable in its simplicity as Lois learns to work with the bread and works with her robot arm and meets other food experts and learns about the Mazg over e-mail with the brothers.  There are great descriptions of food.  It's a good time.

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

This week's short story collection is What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah.  I heard the titular story of this collection on LeVar Burton Reads, along with an interview with the author, and I was impressed so onto the to-read pile it went!

This collection revolves around Nigerian women or Nigerian ex-pats, which is a super refreshing theme and setting.  It also deals heavily with the relationship between mothers and daughters, and it comes at that theme from a lot of different angles.  The titular story is about a post-apocolyptic word where Europe and North America have been flooded and people have fled to Africa.  There's an additional speculative element where mathematicians have found a formula that describes the universe, making it possible for mathematicians to allow people to fly or take away people's grief, which is a skill in high demand in a country overwhelmed with refugees.  In another, women make babies out of objects, their mothers bless life into them, and then they keep the yarn/clay/whicker/whatever baby safe for a year until it becomes flesh, a process made difficult when you don't have a mother to bless your baby.  But most of them are slice of life stories with no speculative elements.  The one I love most is "Light" about a man who rises his daughter through her teenage years when his wife goes to study in America.  It's about how distance affects relationships and how hard it is to parent when you're not on the ground, how hard it is to relate to your parents when they're not an active part of your life.  There is one of the most perfect examples of what a short story can be in "The Future Looks Good," which I'm going to talk about later, and I'm tearing up just thinking about it now (with emotion for the characters and a stunned sense at the story's beauty and maybe a little bit of envy at how well it's executed).  No matter how high-concept these stories are, the focus stays on the people and relationships that are relatable.  The characters are colorful and flawed and engaging.

There's a technique that I heard about at the writer's conference I went to a month ago, that I will write a full blog post about later.  After some round-aboutness, it basically boils down to how you can create an emotional moment by setting up sensory details that puts the reader there with the character, and then the last sentence in your paragraph (or the last sentence of your story or whatever) tells something emotional that gives the character a feeling and the reader is there with them, feeling that feeling.  I was thinking about how it would be really great if I could do this, and then I read the first story of this collection and had to lie down because it was such an exquisitely well executed example of this concept.  The story tells about a family's backstory through a handful of vivid moments, so when the turn hits at the end, it doesn't have to be much, but I'm terrified for the main character.  And then the story ends.  And, like I said, I had to lie down.  But that one's going to be hard to show you, so let me give a different example.  This is the first paragraph of "Second Chances."

Ignore for a moment that two years out of grad school I'm old enough to buy my own bed and shouldn't ask my father to chip in on a mattress, so that he shows up with my mother, who looks like she's stepped out of a photograph, and she tries to charm the salesman, something she was never good at, but it somehow works this time and he takes off 20 percent.  Ignore for a moment that she is wearing an outfit I haven't seen in eighteen years, not since Nigeria, when she was pregnant with my sister, though not yet showing, and fell down the concrete steps to our house, ripping the dress from hem to thigh.  Ignore that she flits from bed to bed, bouncing on each one like she hasn't sat on a mattress in a while, and the salesman follows her around like he'd like to crawl in with her.  Ignore all this because my mother has been dead for eight years.

Whoa!  That deceptively simple sentence hits because we've got this vivid, solid idea of her mother.  In a very short time, I've grown to like her mom as a resilient woman who's outgoing and joyful about mattress shopping.   But this person I've come to like is dead.  And that sentence blows open the whole paragraph that came before, hints that she's an image from a past time that I didn't catch on first read.

This collection is so good, y'all.  Check it out.

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Next week: Sourdough, a novel by Robin Sloan

Rootabaga Stories Review

This week's book is Rootabaga Stories, a collection of American fairy tales by Carl Sandburg.  When I was a kid, we had these on cassette tape, read aloud by (I think?) Carl Sandburg.  He had a distinctive cadence to his voice, which I found myself falling into when I started reading these aloud to my son because my mom sent me a brand new copy of this book for Valentines Day.

It would be hard to give a synopsis of these.  There are several of them, they're very short, and the point of the stories is not what happens but rather the language and the imagery.  So you'll excuse me if I post a longer excerpt than I usually do:

Gimme the Ax lived in a house where everything is the same as it always was.
"The chimney sits on top of the house and lets the smoke out," said Gimme the Ax.  "The door knobs open the doors.  The windows are always either open or shut.  We are always either upstairs or downstairs in this house.  Everything is the same as it always was."
So he decided to let his children name themselves.
"The first words they speak as soon as they learn to make words shall be their names," he said.  "They shall name themselves."
When the first boy came to the house of Gimme the Ax, he was named Please Gimme.  When the first girl came to the house, she was named Ax Me No Questions.
And both of the children had the shadows of valleys by night in their eyes and the lights of early morning, when the sun is coming up, on their foreheads.
And the hair on top of their heads was a dark wild grass.  And they loved to turn the doorknobs, open the doors, and run out to have the wind comb their hair and touch their eyes and put its six soft fingers on their foreheads.
And then because no more boys came and no more girls came, Gimme the Ax said to himself, "My first boy is my last and my last girl is my first and they picked their names themselves."
Please Gimme grew up and his ears got longer.  Ax Me No Questions grew up and her ears got longer.  And they kept on living in the house where everything is the same as it always was.  They learned to say just as their father said, "The chimney sits on top of the house and lets the smoke out, the door knobs open the doors, the windows are always either open or shut, we are always either upstairs or downstairs in this house--everything is the same as it always was."

It's poetry.  That cadence that I remember so well, even though I couldn't have told you what any of the stories were about (except I remember Hatrack the Horse, who wasn't in this collection), just arises naturally from your breathing when you read these stories aloud.

I appreciate how this fits the fairy tale form by use of repetition and flat characters that you can read more into if you want or you can use as an avatar for yourself.  And the repetition also works to make the story lulling, almost hypnotic, which is great for bedtime reading.

I appreciate the odd imagery.  A cliched phrase could get the point across, but these stand out, not because they're inaccurate, but because they're so novel.  The kids in this excerpt have "the shadows of valleys by night in their eyes and the lights of early morning, when the sun is coming up, on their foreheads."  I can perfectly picture children with light on their foreheads, but I have never heard that before, and I never would have come up with that.

I also really like how Midwestern these are.  There's a story about corn fairies who wear overalls, and there's a story about two skyscrapers that fall in love.  But it's more than the content, more than let's tell a fairy tale about a staple of life in Illinois.  There's something in the delivery that not only makes it clearly a fairy tale, but also makes it clearly Midwestern, and I still haven't pin pointed what that is.

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Next week: ???