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. ( )

I'm sure many of you know the premise: Julie Powell hates her job, lives in a crappy apartment, and is about to turn 30. She's looking for something that would bring meaning and purpose to her life, when she and her husband concoct the idea to make all 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days. Crazy? Yes. Stressful? Amazingly so. But does it work? Well, you'll just have to read it to find out.

As a warning to those of you who are more sensitive to foul and coarse language, you may just want to watch the movie (which I've heard really toned down Julie, but I haven't seen it yet). Julie Powell is, well, what I consider to be a typical New Yorker (even though she's really from Texas and gets her foul mouth honestly, so she says). But really, I found her to be extremely relateable (spell check is telling me that's not a word, but I swear it is). What I loved was that she didn't hold back. If it was me, I would have toned down my language, making sure I didn't offend anybody. But she doesn't, and I loved how, because of that, you feel like you know her better, like you know the real Julie.

To tell you the truth, I wish I'd thought of this scheme first. There's no way anyone can do anything like this ever again without someone saying, "Oh, like that Julie/Julia thing, right?" But there's no way I would have finished this. I couldn't have dismembered a live lobster, nor would I care to eat many of the things in that cookbook. But it did make me want to cook. (Maybe not the lobster and liver, but I wouldn't mind trying to whip up some crepes or learn how to make a great omelette.) The funny thing is my grandmother, without knowing I was reading this book, gave me Mastering the Art of French Cooking volumes I & II just the other day. How's that for perfect timing?

My only real critique is that sometimes the writing was a little hard to follow. Julie seemed to skip from topic to topic every once in awhile, but it somehow all ended up tying in to what she was originally talking about. All in all, this is a very enjoyable read: funny, fresh, and inspiring. ( )

far exceeded my expectations after all the movie hype and broad appeal;
great twenty-something coming of age
crude-ish language (I don't mind but just there for recommending to library customers)
loving the intersection of blog becomes book becomes movie

12.09 ( )

What a sel-absorbed whiner. Aren't her 15 minutes up yet? ( )

A mix of love and hate for food, relationships, and goals, a great read that had me laughing out loud, a la David Sedaris. ( )

From my blog: http://weelittleactress.blogspot.com

"If I was going to follow Julia down this rabbit hole, I was going to enjoy it, by God - exhaustion, crustacean murder, and all. Because not everybody gets a rabbit hole. I was one lucky bastard, when you came down to it."
- Julie Powell, Julie & Julia

Recommended Tea: Tibetan Butter Tea

Recently a friend and I had a discussion about our careers.

"I'm so tired of working at a job that I don't care about! Well, I care about it, and it's a great job, but I'm so tired of not being able to do what I love," friend said.

"Well," said I, "maybe you would feel a little better about your job if you did some more stuff on the side that you really DID care about. Like, if I only worked at my job during the day and didn't do anything else, I would lose my mind. Which is why I act on the side. And blog. And volunteer. And act some more. And direct sometimes. And teach sometimes. And sometimes dress up as storybook characters and read to kids. And read. And garden. And write plays."

This is what my life has always been like. Student/bookseller/filer by day, devious actor/volunteer/playwright/director/gardener by night. This has been what has saved my soul and kept it in its little birdhouse. Since I was twelve I have always gone a billion miles a minute, have always done ten things at once. And I intend to keep it that way.

But there's something about working that post-college job that really, really depresses you. Sure, there may exist (in some alternate universe) a collection of people who were able to go right into the job that they always dreamed of. If those people exist, I have never met them. More power to them.

For the rest of us, there's that doomed phrase - "make a living." I touched on this a bit in my blog entry for Into the Wild. After college, after spending four idealistic years studying what you love so that you can do what you love for the rest of your life, you forget about all of the steps that it takes to get to the place where you CAN actually do what you love instead of doing it in your spare time.

This is especially true for the artists among us (and I proudly, maybe a little naively, throw myself into this category). There is no road map, no route to get to your dreams. But there is a light bill. And rent. And food. These are clear, touchable things that you can wrap your head around. Survival means eating and shelter. Eating and shelter mean money. Art and money, at least at first, do not...well... "mesh well."

So you apply at the restaurant or the clothing store or the (cough cough) bookstore. You think "I'll only be here for a little while - just until I can get started. Then it's DREAMTIME!"

Months or even years later, you're still there. And you're still not in dreamville. And the longer you stay OUT of dreamville, the harder it is to find your way back to your route. I am convinced that this is why the world doesn't have as many artists as it should - the artists get trapped in a cubicle and get so comfortable (or scared) that they never want to leave.

But for those of us with one foot in retail and one foot in the arts, there's an overwhelming need to create. To do something that matters. To do ANYTHING that isn't paperwork or folding or (cough cough cough) shelving.

This is what Julie & Julia is about - finding that thing that pulls your soul out of the deep, dark, "make a living" hole and puts it somewhere inspired. Whether that route is cooking your way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking or singing karaoke at Twin Kegs on a Saturday night, the creative have GOT to find ways to create, ways to stay connected to the muse, no matter what they may be.

And what better place to find inspiration than Mrs. Julia Child? Julia Child, in my humble opinion, should be right there on the "great, strong women" shelf next to Eleanor Roosevelt and Katharine Hepburn. She was able to find that thing that she loved more than anything, even though it took her 40 years to find it, and seek it with all of her heart while staying poised and positive. And when she found that thing, she threw herself into it heart and soul.

Julie Powell is similarly worthy of admiration. Not only because she threw herself into this extremely daunting project heart and soul, but because she was able to bring inspiration into her world, grab Julia's hand, and pull herself out of the cubicle ocean.

I also completely adore the idea of following in the path of a (my favorite phrase) "strong woman" in order to learn how to blaze your own. For Julie, that trailblazer was Julia. For me, there have been maybe a billion - Dolly Parton, Stevie Nicks, Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn, Jo March, Elizabeth Bennet, Sarah Bernhardt, and, the one nearest and dearest to my heart nowadays, Virginia Woolf.

One of the things that I love most about being a woman is the feeling that these women (be they fictional or real) are my sisters, my friends, my family members. That they sit on my shoulders like little angels, whispering their words of wisdom, completely ready and willing to help me drag myself out of that ocean of comfortable mediocrity and into the universe of my dreams.

Jo tells me to cut off all of my hair.

Elizabeth encourages me to speak my mind.

Dolly whispers, "If you don't like the road you're walking pave another one."

Stevie screams, "ROCK ON, Gold Dust Woman!"

Katharine shouts, "If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun."

Virginia gingerly places her hand on my shoulder and says, "They say that one must beat one's wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines; the sun falls sheer into pools that are fledged with willows."

And what have they all told me to do in unison? What did Julia tell Julie to do?

JUMP!

Jump into life! Jump into your dreams! Stop wasting your time, energy, and talent. Take a risk. Find a way to make your life about what is really important to you instead of about earning a pay check. Build a little birdhouse in your soul. Show the world that you are a force to be reckoned with instead of trying to play by the world's rules.

And that is exactly what I am going to do. ( )

I bought this book at Costco because I believed it would reflect two of my greatest hobbies, reading and cooking. Cooking the entire Julia Child cookbook in 365 days would be a daunting task for me since I am more of a Whole Foods slash Rachel Ray kind of cook. I usually eyeball simple fresh ingredient recipes and then modify them as I cook. No quail eggs and sweetmeats for me.

I did enjoy the book and Julie's creativity in creating a popular blog to diary her year of living dangerously in the kitchen. The only problem for me, and the reason this was a 2 vs. a 4 on my list, was that I don't like works when they get too girly-girly, or too off color. I'm not a prude, but the occasional swearing and the more information than I want to know tangents into her personal feelings and romantic life turned me off.

Usually, the book is better than the movie. I saw the movie, and it is definitely better than the book. It captures the author's intent in a beautiful way without all the nittty-gritty details.

I give kudos to the author for braving this and turning it into a marvelous "do what you love and the money will follow" tale. ( )

Feeling stagnant in life and work, Julie Powell is suddenly inspired to cook her way through Julia Child's famous Mastering the Art of French Cooking -- a huge feat in itself, but she aims to accomplish it in just one year. Throughout her project Julie records her successes and not-quite-successes in an online blog, inviting the entire world to accompany her on the journey.

A "365 project" -- of any kind -- is the type of endeavor that warms my mildly OCD little heart, and I was both entertained and impressed by Julie's dedication. I can't imagine what the grocery budget looked like for that one year! ( )

I admit, I bought the book based on the movie trailers that I've seen. Now, I'm afraid to see the movie, because I don't know if it will stand up to the book.

I found the book laugh-out-loud funny. Julie puts herself out there and her voice comes through loud and clear and funny. Even without the sincerity of her own voice, she had me in the first chapter when she confessed her love for Buffy.

I don't think this book is really intended for "foodies." Frankly, I'm not inspired to cook calf brains. The story is about Julie's journey through a tough year in her life; she is supported by friends, family, and most of all, her husband, but it is the Julie/Julia Project that prods her to keep going through thick and thin.

I, for one, am looking forward to the next installment. ( )

2007 ( )

This is such an odd premise for a book - Julie Powell sets herself a challenge to cook everything from a cookbook of Julia Child's within a year. And yet it somehow works. Woven in between the culinary descriptions, Julie describes the comes and goings of her life, her partner and her job.

It does get a tad repetitve - there's only so many times you can reiterate that mayonnaise is hard to cook. She also comes across as slightly hysterical and has a few too many temper tantrums to be a wholly likeable person.

The ending is slightly anti-climatic, but you do feel for her in the end.

Worth reading, but borrow it - don't buy it. ( )

Yes, everybody has read this one, but I include it because I have a particular fondness for diaries, journals, and yes blogs. Julies' story is our story: how does one structure one's life after tragedy, how does one go on? You do the next thing that needs to be done, then the next, and one day you find you are breathing again on your own, you will indeed live.

cooking

Seriously? This book is truly excellent. I mean it. Yes, it's slight, yes it's yet another of those blog-turned-book-deal things, but it's razor-sharp and poignant, hilarious and sometimes sad, but always engaging and frequently educational. It's a treat.

The premise: thirty-year-old Julie Powell, a secretary living in the outer boroughs of NYC in apartment that her mother is convinced she's going to die in, decides apropos of not much that in the space of one year, she is going to cook her way through the five-hundred-plus recipes in Julia Child's famous cookbook, Mastering The Art of French Cooking. Of course, she blogged it - but this was in 2001, when such things weren't quite ubiquitous - and, something I think is enormously in her favour, the book is not simply a rehash of the greatest hits of the blog but tries to tell a complete narrative, with some blog entries merely reproduced where appropriate.

And, well, it's fabulous and compulsively readable. While she writes reams about the recipes - all of which feature tonnes and tonnes of butter - she punctuates it with tales of her own life, her work for the government agency clearing up the debris after 9/11, her long-suffering husband, her romantic-hero brother, her mother, her friends, and she brings all of them to life. She's cheerfully rude about her Republican colleagues, at one point feeds them a cake filled with ceramic shards and antifreeze, and is relentlessly cutting about the Bush administration, in and around her adventures cooking marrowbones, calves' brains and apples in aspic and other such horrifying delicacies. In short, she writes very well indeed, and with a kind of intimate familiarity; in any case, in her description of herself as a foul-mouthed hysteric with misanthropic tendencies, she rang very familiar for me.

The one flaw of the book, I think, is the attempts at vignettes in the real life of Julia Child - while these aren't bad, per se, I really think they're unnecessary and a sign of lack of confidence in her own story, which is entirely unjustified.

In short: please look beyond the provenance and the cover, and don't be afraid for a minute that this is going to be one of those cook-yoursef-thin horrors (not only is it all butter all the time, nowhere does anyone discuss diets in this book). It's one of the best I've read this year. ( )

Wow, is all I can say and that is so that I can keep this nice. I really did not like this book at all. I tried three time to finish it and just could not do it. I don't know if is was her writing or the bad language or just lack of content. But it did nothing for me, which was a great let down. I don't feel it was a compliment to Mrs. Child at all. I may have finish it if it had more about her and less about Julie. Julie I did not find interesting. Sorry. ( )

Fun, slightly weird quarter-life crisis book. ( )

If you measure a book by its ability to make you feel strong emotions towards a character, than this would be a winner. It invoked a great deal of emotion in me.

I wasn’t a fan of Julie Powell. I don’t know her, but the parts of her that she shared publically in the book, aren’t her best (I have to give her credit for that, at least). She’s a little harsh, a, little too egocentric, emotional, melodramatic (by her own accord – p. 106) and just plain mean (to her parents, brother, husband, friends, September 11 survivors, well everyone).

When she let the cat out of the bag on a family secret, to try and make her emotionally stable brother babble like a six year old, I realized I had a choice and could put this one down. So that’s what I did. Bummer.

I loved this little book about Julie's year of attempting to work through Julia Child's cookbook and blogging about her experiences and the recipes. Easy to read, casual, funny. I really enjoyed this book and can't wait to see the movie! ( )

Librarything told me I would like this, but let me tell you, I did not! Wow! What a letdown. I generally like memoirs and I love food, so I thought I couldn't go wrong here, but this didn't work for me at all. I actually fell asleep twice while reading this. Insomniacs take note - here is your cure! I don't feel like I'm being unduly harsh here either either. I should point out that I read an uncorrected proof version of this book, so perhaps the prose in the finished product was more polished than in my copy. I certainly hope so. The writing style here was not at all engaging. The recipes didn't interest me in the slightest - I felt the cooking descriptions for the most part stomach churning. I guess I should point out that I don't eat meat, but I reckon even the biggest carnivore would have felt slightly queasy at the lengthy descriptions of bone marrow, liver, kidneys etc. Yuck!

I guess I also pretty much disliked Powell herself too. She doesn't come across at all well in this book. Certainly not my kind of person. On more than one occasion she attempts to make light of 9/11 and just seems to have an unpleasant demeanor overall. I felt mostly sorry for her husband. The guy had a lot to put up with!

I'm still going to watch the movie. The trailer looks like fun, and it couldn't be any worse than this, at least! ( )

Oh man, this was painful. Not that it was badly written because it wasn't really. And at first, she's kind of funny in a self-deprecating sort of way...and then the more she talks about herself, the more I was put off. She complains..about 9/11 victims? About a very nice husband? About republicans, nonstop? Encourages a friend to have an affair with a married man? What kind of person IS this? Just left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Gross. Julia Child was right, it was disrespectful, and impossible to take seriously. ( )

Could not even finish this miserable little book. Major disappointment. Read "My Life in France" instead. ( )

Although it did get a bit repetitive by the end, I enjoyed the comic moments and Julie's unique viewpoint. ( )

ulie Powell is almost thirty and in a dead end job. She's also just found out that she is reproductively challenged. After making the comforting Potage Parentier (potato leek soup) from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, her husband Eric talks her into a cooking challenge, to cook all 524 recipes in a year and to blog about the experience. Julie decides she needs a focus in her life and accepts the challenge.

I started this book after being disappointed by the portrayal of a female character in Moonlight in Odessa. So I found Julie's story a humorous relief. Her experiences, frought with diseaster and success are funny and delightful. It does have the Bridget Jones quality that some reviewers have compared it to. I also love her husband Eric, very patient and supportive. Julie picks up quite a following in the fairly new blog world, including her mother, who begs her to stop thr Julie/Julia Project, as she has dubbed this experiment. Julie works for a government agency in NYC and takes shots at the many Republicans she works with.

I picked up my wax paper-covered Charlotte Malakoff and the pieces of my souffle dish and rushed into the building, face hot with humiliation. And after I got up to the office and left the heaped remains of charlotte out on the counter of the staff kitchen with a note saying "Please Enjoy!" I had to go to the six Democrats in the office and tell them they might want to take a pass since there might be ceramic shards or antifreeze in it.

Some of the chapters made me hungry, some put me off food. Her experience with cutting up a live lobster and hysterical and disturbing. And at the start of this project, Julie and Eric are in the process of moving into a loft, with terrible heating and bad plumbing. With various visiting family members and some crazy friends, Julie has lots of people to try her food out on all of which makes for an interesting and entertaining read.

Though I greatly enjoyed this book, it seems to be for many, a love it or hate it. Some don't like her political affiliation and others think she swears too much. But I thought it was funny and edgy and refreshing, just what I needed.

my rating 4/5

Product Details

* Pub. Date: September 2006
* Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
* Format: Paperback, 336pp ( )

I had hoped for a charming look at coming to terms with one's life. I had hoped for amusing and poignant musings on marriage. I had hoped for fabulous descriptions of cooking, mess-making, and eating. At least the messes were glorious! Overall, I misjudged the genre and tone of this book. (After all, cooking is cozy. Eating is cozy. Delicious food is cathartic. And Julia Child is warm and delightful. Julie Powell's story is... not.) Neither the story nor the characters drew me in or invited me to consider life in a new way. The most I can say for this is that it was sometimes funny and it wasn't a slow or boring read. ( )

I saw the Julie/Julia movie first and thought I'd enjoy Julie and Julia: the book. Julie Powell comes off as whiny and self-centered in her book and I hardly felt any empathy for her. With the writing style she uses, it was not hard to see why she spent her early career as a secretary instead of a writer. ( )