Issue 11: Sea of Tranquility + Maple Milk Bread

A book about time travel across five centuries, and a pillowy bread full of maple syrup

May 27, 2022

Welcome to Good Book/Good Bread! Every two weeks, I recommend a book I love, and bake a delicious bread that fits with an aspect of the story. Haven’t subscribed yet? Sign up here!

This week: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel and Maple Milk Bread from Eric Kim.

Part 1: Good Book

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel (2022)

Setting the tone

Moon Song by Phoebe Bridgers, here.

In a nutshell

Sea of Tranquility is a work of fiction that follows three different lives over five hundred years that all intersect in a way that defies what we know about chronological time. The story begins in 1912 with Edwin, a wealthy young British man exiled from his high society family. His father funds a one-way trip to Canada, and Edwin finds himself on a remote part of Vancouver Island. Two hundred years later, we meet Olive, a successful writer who is on a book tour when a pandemic hits. Unfortunately, Olive lives on a moon colony, and is marooned on Earth where her tour is taking place as the sickness spreads. Lastly, the reader encounters Gaspery, an aimless young man working as security at a hotel until he gets a job at a secret government body, the Time Institute. He is trained to time travel and investigate a strange experience Edwin and Olive have both had. By visiting them in the past, Gaspery learns about the complexities of doing the right thing and the power of actions that can’t be undone.

Why I was drawn to this book

I’ve read two of Emily St. John Mandel’s previous books, Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, and found both to have very memorable characters that I thought about frequently after reading. Given that both books have many characters, with each just getting a small amount of real estate in the book, I think that’s quite a feat. I rarely felt like reading either book was a relaxing experience, but I was singularity compelled to tear through them. I’m continually amazed at how Mandel manages to come up with such bizarre and well thought out plots. I was very eager to read this new book and see what other world Mandel created. As I’ve found with other books by Mandel, Sea of Tranquility may be best read in a more condensed time frame to make it easier to keep track of the multiple storylines.

Three things I loved about Sea of Tranquility

1. Completely trusting in Mandel’s vision

Mandel is a master of creating narrative trust. The characters in Sea of Tranquility are located so far from one another in time and experience, and there is little indication of how they are eventually going to overlap until well into the book. Regardless, I trusted her that all of the stories were building something together, even if I didn’t have visibility into what that was.

In the first part of the book, we meet Edwin, the young man banished by his family and on an indefinite trip in Canada. Mandel sets him up perfectly to go on an epic wilderness adventure on Vancouver Island, complete with serendipitous meetings with other travellers who he can partner with, and leads on lucrative work. And then, our intrepid traveller ends up relaxing in a boarding house for months on end and never does anything. Setting Edwin up in this way where the reader jumps to conclusions, and then has those expectations inverted, allows Mandel to create strong narrative trust that carries the reader through this story of many strands.

2. The artificial sky dome in the moon colonies

In Sea of Tranquility’s storylines that are set in the future, Earth is still populated, but many people also live on moon colonies. The first moon colony site was located on the Sea of Tranquility, where the Apollo 11 astronauts first landed. Interest in moving to the moon colonies was so great that a second colony was established, but built too quickly. This meant that the artificial dome lighting, meant to look just like sky when viewed from Earth, failed and was too expensive to fix. Colony two lost the illusion of the 24-hour day. Instead, they spend two weeks in complete brightness, followed by two in darkness. For the inhabitants, this means “no more false atmosphere, no more shifting pixelations to give the impression of clouds, no more carefully calibrated preprogrammed sunrises and sunsets, no more blue.”

I loved this eerie idea of a giant dome overhead mimicking the daily changes in light and colour we live our lives by. It fascinated me to think about a dome covering an entire civilization, and how fragile and reliant we are on the rhythms of the sky. For days after reading the book I kept looking up and trying to imagine what it would be like the moment the dome lighting failed on colony two.

3. Learning about remittance men

Edwin St. James, the character we meet at the beginning of the book, was sent away to Canada by his family after he made a scene by questioning British colonialism at a dinner party. In her sources, Mandel cites Scoundrels, Dreamers and Second Sons: British Remittance Men in the Canadian West, which sent me down a rabbit hole. In Victorian Britain, remittance men were typically outcasts or problematic sons in wealthy families who were sent to British colonies and supported by regular payments from home. Often the intention of exiling these young men was so that they wouldn’t remain in Britain and emberass the family. Thousands of remittance men came to Canada, with many working on ranches or in logging settlements in the west.

I thought this was fascinating to learn about, and I likely wouldn’t have known about this strange bit of history had I not ready the book. Having lived on northern Vancouver Island, rugged even nowadays, I’m obsessed with the idea of upper crust Edwin arriving by ship among the fog and old growth of this remote part of the world. I think I may have been watching too much Our Flag Means Death, but this seems like it has legs as a historical comedy.

Notable passage

“It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day. You wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake up in ignorance and by the evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here.”

If you like Sea of Tranquility, read this:

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
This is How You Lose The Time War By Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Part 2: Good Bread

Maple Milk Bread

This recipe is from Eric Kim at New York Times cooking, and you can watch a delightful video of him preparing it here. The dough is formed into two dough balls which are nestled together in a loaf pan where they bake together into a single loaf. You can hold the ends of the loaf once baked and break the loaf into its two distinct parts, a uniquely satisfying experience.

Why this bread for this book?

Milk bread is the epitome of perfect, white sandwich bread. There are variations of milk bread in multiple cultures, but what sets it apart from other white breads is tangzhong. This is a paste created by cooking flour and milk together that gives the bread an incredibly light and moist crumb. The moon is a significant setting in Sea of Tranquility, and this ethereal white bread with its beautiful rounded top reminded me of the moon, complete with its dense crumb, pitted like the moon’s surface from comet and asteroid impacts.

Mistakes were made…

There is usually one mishap anytime I bake anything, but I managed a few with this one!

In step 2, when you remove the tangzhong from the stovetop and add in the other ingredients, including cream and instant yeast, I think my cream was too cold and kept the yeast from activating completely. Once baked, there was some undissolved yeast on the outside of the bread. Next time, I will take the cream out of the fridge earlier so the dough isn’t too cold, inhibiting the yeast from doing its thing.

Despite the recipe saying that you should let the dough rise until it’s risen an inch above the rim of the loaf pan, I got nervous when it reached the lip that it would go too far, and put it in the oven too early. While my bread was still delicious, it didn’t have the cute mushroom shaped top that Eric describes as looking like an emoji of a loaf of bread. Next time I will be more patient…an ongoing process!

Works well:

Sliced while still warm, eaten plain
As grilled cheese
Fried and topped with jam

Looking forward…

New book I’m looking forward to reading: Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

Bread I’m looking forward to baking: Cheddar and jalapeño sourdough

New album I’m looking forward to listening to while doing both of the above: Preacher’s Daughter by Ethel Cain

Have other books, bread, or music you’d recommend I check out? Reply to this email or leave a comment. And, if you liked this issue, feel free to hit the heart button (it helps other people find my newsletter!)