Julie & Julia
My Year of Cooking Dangerously
by Julie Powell
Overview
From the Publisher
The bestselling memoir that's "irresistible....A kind of
Bridget Jones meets
The French Chef" (Philadelphia Inquirer) is now a major motion picture. Audiobook read by the author and value-priced!
Directed by Nora Ephron, starring Amy Adams as Julie and Meryl Streep as Julia, the film Julie & Julia will be released by Sony Pictures on April 19, 2009.
The film is based on this bestselling memoir in which Julie Powell, nearing thirty and trapped in a dead-end secretarial job, resolves to reclaim her life by cooking in the span of a single year, every one of the 524 recipes in Julia Child's legendary Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her unexpected reward: not just a newfound respect for calves' livers and aspic, but a new life-lived with gusto.
My thoughts
I very much enjoyed Julia Child's recent memoir about living in France. I did not, however, enjoy Julie Powell's book about Julia Child's cookbook. In fact, I disliked it so much that I invoked the Nancy Pearl Rule of 50. If you get to 50 pages and it's not cutting it, cut your losses and move on. Life is too short to read a lousy book.
The first 50 pages of the book have enough raunchiness to have completely turned me off. The f-word can be effective when well placed, or it can be a gimmick to cover up a lack of writing skills that enables the author to tell a story without resorting to High School syntax. It was used and over-used in the first 50 pages of the book. Julia Child's cookbook and drawings have some sort of sexual connotations to the author, who admits freely that she's a nut case. I tend to agree.
Maybe the book is good. I'll never know. I have put it away for good.
Before cracking the cover of this book I couldn't wait to get to the theater to see this movie. I'm writing that off now as well until the reviews are in.
NOT a Favorite Passage
I stood over the skillet, poking at the butter. "Melt, [bleep]." I was supposed to clarify the butter - which is done by skimming off the white scum that appears when butter melts - then get it very hot before browning the rounds of bread in it. There were a lot of things I was supposed to be doing these days that I wasn't. Instead I threw the bread in as soon as the butter liquefied. Of course the canapes - which is what I was making out of the rounds of bread - didn't brown, just grew soggy and yellow and buttery. "[Bleep] it. It's eleven o'clock at night and I do not give one [bleep] about the [bleep]-ing bread," I said as I took them back out again and dropped them onto two plates.
"Julie, seriously, do you have to talk like that?"
Now I was turning the heat up on the winey egg-poaching liquid to cook it down for sauce. "Are you [bleep]ing kidding me?"
