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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