Julie & Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen / Julie Powell

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I saw the movie before I read the book, which I almost never do, but so be it. The eBook was available from the library, so I downloaded it to my Nook. It was an impulse, but it was also free. This is why I bought the Nook and not the Kindle. This is how libraries work, and hopefully will work in the future. Reading books should not have to cost excessive amounts of money.

Anyway, Julie & Julia is the book that the blogging part of the movie is based on, the Amy Adams storyline (an actress, in my humble opinion, who is about as perfect as they come). I really enjoyed the movie (which I rewatched after finishing Julie & Julia), but I also enjoyed the book, but in a different way. Of course everyone knows how Nora Ephron used Julia Child’s memoir My Life in France to serve as the grist for the Meryl Streep (another perfect actress) half of the movie. Julie & Julia provides the structure for both stories. Even the book has short vignettes from Julia’s life, but the main focus is, of course, Julie Powell and her real-life efforts at whipping up every egg recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking (abbreviated as MtAoFC), every aspic, murdering lobsters, melting slabs of butter the size of Connecticut, and boning a duck and putting it in a nice little suit made out of pastry.

The Julie of the book and I assume the Julie in real life, is a bit more hard-bitten, foul-mouthed, and bad-tempered than angelic Amy Adams or at least the version of Julie she plays in the movie. I know that Amy's Julie threw some pans in the movie and her husband got fed up and slept one night at his office, but Julie Powell in the book version throws the F-bombs around like a sailor and has tantrums that would chasten a two-year old. And her efforts at reproducing the recipes are sometimes so unsuccessful that you really wonder if they deserve a check-mark in the “finished” column in her project (once instead of cointreau in a orange bavarois she uses kirsch and rum!) Still, there’s something really compelling about the book. Maybe it's her misadventures that make her somewhat endearing. You have the feeling that anyone could undertake a challenge like this and succeed. All you need to do is blog about it and maybe you’ll get a book deal out of it.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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