Sourdough by Robin Sloan

Sourdough
by Robin Sloan
MCD, 272 pages, 2017

Lois Clary is used to being wooed. As a female programmer, she gets recruited to work for General Dexterity, a San Francisco based company that specializes in robotics and changing the world. But soon Lois finds her work/life balance thrown off by her soul-sucking work. Her stomach hurts all the time. She's not eating well. She's not sleeping well. But things begin to look up when she finds the magical "Double Spicy" soup and sandwich combo from Clement's Street Soup and Sourdough. The food feeds her soul as well as her body, as does the friendship of the the charming brothers who own the restaurant. When the brothers are forced to leave the country, they give Lois the Clement's Street sourdough starter. Though Lois never bakes, she has resorted to drinking nutritive gel to avoid it, she decides to learn how to make sourdough bread. In her adventures with the mysterious and idiosyncratic Clement's Street starter, Lois not only finds a talent for baking bread, but she finds herself being wooed again.

This is a delightful and quick read. I start it and couldn't put it down. Not only did I crave spongey carbohydrates the whole time I was reading, but I also thought about my own work/life balance and what I could do to add more joy to my life.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Cheryl Strayed was lost. Set adrift by her mother's death and the sad dissolution of her own
marriage, Cheryl is desperate to find the woman her mother raised her to be. With no
experience or training, she would hike alone starting in the Mojave Desert through
California and Oregon and into Washington State on a mission to find herself again.

Through sheer determination and stubbornness, Cheryl pushes through when other more
experienced hikers decide to quit. Strayed's account on her experience and interaction on
the PCT are interwoven with her memories of her family and especially her mother's
influence. As Cheryl hikes, she works through the grief she feels for her mother and the loss
of her family. Ultimately, she is able to make peace with the ghost of her mother and the
ghost of past decisions.

This memoir is gritty and gorgeously dense with description of Strayed's inner turmoil and
the outward peace of the countryside. Both a mediation on grief and loss and a celebration of
the human spirit, Wild is a harrowing and humorous tale of finding oneself in the
wilderness.

This book contains adult language and situations. You have been warned.