Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously

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 show more 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. show less

.Just thinking of the author, Julie Powell's journey into Julia Child's world leaves me exhausted, fascinated and in awe of her husband's tolerance and patience. I found myself laughing out loud at her misadventures in the kitchen, and even her constant use of the word f xxx. I scold anyone who uses the word, and yet Ms Powell's writing style pulled me in, realizing it was the only way she expressed her emotions. It added to, rather than taking from, the elements of good writing.
Using her blogging experiences also added a fun dimension to her memoir, which is more like a confessional. She hates her day job, loves her offbeat friends and describes catastrophic attempts at French cooking as if she is sitting in my living room discussing show more the same. I was able to imagine Julia Child being a crude, honest and full of just-do-it courage as Julie was in her memoir, including the profanity laced throughout. Eric, the author's husband, reminded me of Paul, Ms. Child's husband, in his acceptance of the hilarious attempt of the wife learning the art of French cooking. Neither could cook, and yet, over time, both became media darlings from their culinary talents.
As I cook for my husband I'll smile as I remember so many parts of this book, making the monotonous daily meal a more meaningful and at times an amusing adventure. I highly recommend this book, and if you think seeing the movie was enough you might rethink that idea.This book delivers so much more and is an excellent gift for any one who loves cooking or blogging. show less

Throughout reading Julie & Julia, I found Julie pretty consistently awful. Her preoccupation with and constant discussing of sex is off-putting and uncomfortable for me. The way she talks about mental illness and the mentally ill is disturbing and offensive. Her flippant comparisons of her everyday life to historical genocides and wars is jarring and also unendearing. Her approach to kitchen sanitation made me gag a lot while reading. And from the way she herself describes her relationships with her friends and husband, I cannot for the life of me figure out why they put up with her. Especially before she became a source of delicious French food.

All of that said, this book is a really interesting look back at early internet and blog show more culture, and the general atmosphere and culture of the early 2000s.The writing is good. And the story itself is interesting and engaging enough to make it worth a read despite my dislike of the narrator-author, which is quite a trick for a memoir. show less

"Julie and Julia" is Julie Powell's memoir about the year she tried to cook all of Julia Child's recipes in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" (MAoFC). Much like the movie with the same name, the book is as much about Julie's life--her marriage, her friendships, her thankless job--as it is about cooking. Unlike the movie, this book is really just about Julie, there is very little "real" Julia Child in this book. The only Julia in this book is the one in Julie's head, who almost like an imaginary friend, cheers Julie on as she make her way through MAoFC and helps her to discover an inner passion for cooking and how it brings people together.

I really enjoyed this book. I thought Julie was honest and funny about the challenges of being show more young and direction-less in modern urban America. I found it interesting to see how Julie used the project to discover a real passion in herself and to provide herself a purpose that ultimately led her to fulfilment (and an extra 15 pounds of butter weight!). That being said, I don't agree with everything that Julie said or did, and yes she could be a little self centered at times. But this is her memoir, so she has a right to share the world from her perspective.

If you are drawn to this book because you loved the movie--be warned, this Julie is a much more colorful (in both language and personality), well drawn character than the Julie in the movie, who in my opinion was sanitized into a typical romantic comedy heroine. Yes there are a lot of incidents that were in the movie that are also in the book. But the book is really about Julie and her life, not Julia Child. That being said, I loved both the book and the movie, but recognize them as two distinct works.

If you're interested in reading about how one woman found herself through the completion of an unreasonable project that most people would never even think of undertaking, this book is for you. It shows Julie's project as it was--with all of the messes, curses and challenges that it contained. If you go into the book knowing that, I don't think you'll be dissapointed. show less

365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen. How one girl risked her marriage, her job, and her sanity to master the art of French cooking.
This is one of the few books I picked up to read and didn’t put it down until it was finished. I might have blown away half a Saturday, this ‘weekend gourmet’s’ cooking day, but every laugh was worth it. There are just so many parallels - I regaled my husband by reading out paragraphs and saying “remember when … we made Kayla’s birthday cake and knocked the goldfish over when the spout flew off the end of the piping bag” etc. Though the hygiene and some of the recipes aren’t my style, this book definitely is and it’s worth a big, buttery A+.

With the humor of Bridget Jones and the vitality of Augusten Burroughs, Julie Powell recounts how she conquered every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and saved her soul!

Julie Powell is 30-years-old, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a soul-sucking secretarial job that’s going nowhere. She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged assignment. She will take her mother's dog-eared copy of Julia Child's 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she will cook all 524 recipes. In the span of one year.

At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the simple Potage Parmentier (potato soup) into the more complicated realm of aspics show more and crépes, she realizes there’s more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the eye. With Julia’s stern warble always in her ear, Julie haunts the local butcher, buying kidneys and sweetbreads. She sends her husband on late-night runs for yet more butter and 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 turned her kitchen into a miracle of creation and cuisine. She has eclipsed her life’s ordinariness through spectacular humor, hysteria, and perseverance. show less

Since reading enchanting books like Ruth Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires; David Shalleck’s Mediterranean Summer; and Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun, I’ve attempted to broaden my horizons and read some more “foodie lit”. So, in that vein, I picked up a copy of Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously at Half-Price Books a couple of weeks ago.

Boy, did I choose wrong.

At what point do you stop reading a book because it is, frankly, awful?

I really thought it was me until I, just this second, went to Amazon to get the book’s cover art – and saw the 2 1/2-star rating. You mean maybe, by some chance, it’s not just me??! Can I stop reading this book now?

Julie and Julia is not worth even the attempted show more read. The language! Way too much information on intimacy! More language!

I would not touch this book again with a ten-foot pole – and I haven’t even finished it yet. I have two hundred pages left and now realize that no matter how engagingly Julie Powell writes about lobster, chocolate, and – and I can’t even think of a third food item to round out that list! – this book is not worth any more time. It’s the Lord of the Flies of foodie lit. It’s the book I’ve been forcing myself to attempt to finish just for the sake of saying “I finished!” – much like Julie herself is forcing herself through Julia Child’s (bless her) Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I can’t take it anymore.

Please, dear readers, do yourselves a favor and Skip. It. Go watch Meryl Streep and Amy Adams in what I now realize is (while still imperfect) a very cleaned-up “Julie & Julia”. Enjoy Stanley Tucci as Paul Child. (Isn't Stanley fantastic?) Don’t think twice about the book. You’re not missing anything. show less