Julie & Julia by Julie Powell

Julie Powell is 30 years old, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a secretarial job that's going nowhere. She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged assignment. She will cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child's 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In the span of one year. At first she thinks it will be easy, but as she moves from simple potato soup into more complicated realms, she realizes there's more to Mastering the Art than meets the eye. She haunts the local butcher, buying kidneys and sweetbreads. She rarely serves dinner before midnight. She discovers how to mold the perfect Orange Bavarian, the trick to extracting marrow from bone, and the intense pleasure of eating liver. And somewhere along the line she realizes she has eclipsed her life's ordinariness through humor, hysteria, and perseverance.--From publisher description.

Moderately amusing fluff, easy enough to read but not that substantial. A little scattered in places, which is fine when the digressions are interesting or funny, but I don't know that I care that much about all Julie's friends and their various romantic entanglements, you know? Particularly since I couldn't really keep her friends separate in my head. At its best when writing about the food, unsurprisingly, and really gets into the visceral and messy parts of cooking.

Update after watching the movie per the Bookriot challenge - movie was better, though oddly Julie comes off worse in the movie? The book doesn't have much of a narrative arc, so the movie tried to create one by adding in some marital drama (arising out of a truly juvenile tantrum by Julie). The best parts of the movie were pretty much all Julia and Paul Child's life in France and Julia learning to cook. Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci are so wonderful and this made me want an entire movie starring them, instead of half of one.

(Bookriot Read Harder 2016 Challenge: #18 Read a book that was adapted into a movie, then watch the movie. Debate which is better.)

Deep sigh. I loved the movie, and loved [b:My Life in France 5084 My Life in France Julia Child http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165517460s/5084.jpg 1602216]... but I felt saddened by Julie & Julia. All I sensed was desperation, frustration at a life that doesn't have to be that way. Powell is searching, sometimes angrily and even nastily, and I wonder how her life has been after the end of her Project (the year of Julia Child). There seems to be some bitterness in Ms Powell, and it comes out too much in her book. I feel sorry for her, and sorry to have read her book: it's TMI, more than I needed to know.If you enjoyed the film, please consider relishing those memories: skip the book.

Julie and Julia is the autobiographical story of how Julie Powell decided to cook (and blog) her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year's time. Feeling lost at her government agency secretarial job, and facing the reality of her approaching 30th birthday, Julie decides she needs some goal or purpose in her life. Encouraged by her husband Eric, she embarks on her culinary journey that includes such feats as splitting a marrow bone, creating aspic, cooking a live lobster, and boning a duck.

If only the story had focused on her adventures in the kitchen, I may have been a bit more engrossed in the action. However, it seemed like a great deal of the book focused on the sexual adventures of Julie's friends. Which would have been ok (I get that a major theme of the book is her trying to compare fine foods to good sex) if only she weren't so whiny about it all. Whining about her job is one thing - being a secretary for a really depressing government agency overlooking the giant hole in the ground that was once the Twin Towers isn't fun - but whining because she married her high school sweetheart and isn't having all of the adulterous relationships enjoyed by her friends? Give me a break. Whining about her cramped kitchen space with dubious pipping? Sure, that can't be fun to deal with, especially when you are making mounds of dirty dishes on a daily basis. But whining because you have to cook amazingly delicious food on a daily basis? Umm, no, you signed up for that. Her attitude ping pongs between “I am so lucky I get to do this and have amazing support and an adoring husband” and “Woe is I, for I must cook, and work, and I have only had adult relations with very few men. Sniffle.” The inconsistency of her attitude is a really annoying and more than slightly off-putting.

On top of her attitude, the book itself has a somewhat scattered and unorganized tone. I mean, in general she recounts her tale chronologically, with the insertion of important flashback scenes, but she tends to ramble and wander from topic to topic as she slowly comes back to the point at hand. On occasion I found some of her thoughts to be witty, and I can see how her more conversational style would be good for a daily blog, where the scope was more limited and the content more focused. But more often the writing in the book left me re-reading sentences and trying to wrangle the mess of English in front of my into a cohesive thought. I found the most enjoyable segments to be the small inserts that speculate the lives of Paul and Julia Child. Honestly, Paul Child was my favorite character in the entire book and he only amounted to just over 10 pages of action. The only other consistently amusing segment was the highlighted reader comments from her blog.

Despite all this I did finish the book within a few days time. Which is good because I think if I had put it down I would not have picked it back up again. I am also grateful that the book was bought used - at least I didn't sink a ton of money into it, and I won't feel bad at all about selling it back to the bookshop. I love the movie, so I suppose it was fated that I would read the book. I almost wish I hadn't. In the film Amy Adams does a wonderful job of taking this neurotic and abrasive secretary and turning her into a quirky and relatable individual. The movie also does a much better job of focusing on the story at hand - enriching one's life through cooking - because it focuses on Julia Child's story (played by the sublime Meryl Streep) as much as it does Julie Powell's. I am not one who often champions a movie over a book, but in this case the movie is undeniably better, most likely because the screenplay was written by Nora Ephron (of You've Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle fame) who knows how to tell a compelling and cohesive story. All things considered, my final recommendation is this: skip the book, watch the movie.

Loved it. This book was VERY well written. The only thing I didn't totally love was that there was an odd occasional shift from past tense to present tense and back again, with no clear signal of when or why it was occurring. I'm not sure whether this was done on purpose or was an accidental remnant of the book's origin as a blog. Either way, I found it occasionally confusing. Still, I loved it.