I bought this book for my mother for Christmas when this book was still new. I scoured the bookstore for something she might like. I even asked one of the overworked staff for advice. He recommended Tatum O’Neil’s autobiography, on the merit that it was too awful for words. I kept looking.

I should probably add that I’d already bought my mother a book for Christmas, which I had to return because my stepfather decided to buy her the same book. He had also decided that he was going to be the one to give her said book and I was going to be the one roaming the aisles of a crowded bookstore a week before the big day.

So after the O’Neil lover abandoned me for another customer, I was in the new release section, borderline catatonic. And suddenly, Julie and Julia caught my eye. Mostly it was the cover. Green is a very soothing color, and I could relate to the whisk collapsed on it’s side.

The premise seemed very cool: A woman cooks her way through Julia Child in a tiny kitchen during her thirtieth year. Sounded good. I bought it, wrapped it, and gave it to my mother, whose only comment upon reading it was, “She seems a little self-involved.”

I completely forgot about the book until I was sitting in a movie theater and all of a sudden, Amy Adams and Meryl Streep popped up. A movie! From a book! From a blog! (Is it just me, or shouldn’t Meryl Streep exist in a world where blogs don’t exist?)

So I figured I’d finally read the book. And…eh.

I just kept waiting for the revelation. Why adapt a blog into a memoir, anyway? Isn’t that redundant? Why not a novel? At least that would let her fictionalize and put in some kind of theme or at least an ending.

And yes, like my mother, I found it terribly self-involved.

I caught the Julie/Julia project just as it was finishing (always late to the party), but I enjoyed it, and I looked forward to the book – with some reservations. I was worried that the book would read like a series of blog entries (there’s nothing wrong with a series of blog entries, mind you, I just didn’t feel like I needed them bound up into a book). The good news is that this is a book on it’s own. You don’t need to have read or to have loved the blog. It certainly tells the same story as the blog, but it does it in a way that’s appropriate for a book.

Julie and Julia isn’t great literature, but it is a fun, quick read. I like it when ordinary people take on extraordinary goals (and cooking all of the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the space of a year is certainly an extraordinary goal, on all sorts of levels). It’s particularly good when, against the odds, they succeed.

Great concept, irritating voice.

The process of reading this book was a strange amalgam of vague pleasure and intense annoyance.
Pleasure because the book was interesting enough, chronicling the efforts of a nearly-30 New York desk jockey deeply rooted in her discontent to escape by cooking all 524 of the recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Annoyance because her stupid book contract stemmed out of the stupid blog she conceived to chronicle it originally. And if she can get a book deal for that sort of thing, what the hell is wrong with me?

Anyway, it’s full of that blog-world angst we all know and love, a plethora of culinary disasters, strange characters, family dynamics, offal, eccentric cats, swearing, ranting, small-scale drama, and the word kattywhompus. So obviously it’s got stuff going for it. And I got through it in just a few hours. Though I must admit that I was speed-reading at the end because I wanted it to be over with and off my plate.

It was interesting… but no Ruth Reichl.

So there you have it. I need to get a haircut and get a real blog.

11.2005
3/5 Stars
Julie Powell cooked all 524 recipies, in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, during the course of a year. In Julie & Julia she recounts her adventures with cooking the recipies – several of these anecdotes are very funny – and how she blogged them which turned into a book deal and career as a food writer.

I used to read her blog when it was being written, so I was curious how this would turn out. I liked it a lot, and was surprised when it was actually quite different from the blog. I was a little afraid it would be the same thing, written a little differently, but it was very much its own entity.