Skip to main content

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

By
Click here to check for availability at AFPLS

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

By
The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation.  Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Here we are / Graham Swift

By
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.
Post a Comment
Read more

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

By
A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.
Post a Comment
Read more