I love the concept, I really do; not so much the finished product.

Had she not made the funny reference to my favorite line in Casablanca near the beginning of the book, I never would have been able to finish it. The thought of finding another gem like that made me stick with it even when I wanted to throw Julie out of a twenty-story window. The whiny, self-absorbed, melodramatic, narcissistic, trite (yet on occasion deliciously funny) Julie Powell decides to take up a project to add meaning to her life, or at least to distract herself from dealing with it. She decides that she is going to cook every single recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and that she is going to do it in the time span of a year.

Julie never mentions how many hours she actually works in a week at her "oh pity me, the lowly secretary who still makes enough money to live in New York and buy enough food to cook every single recipe in the Julia Child MtAoFC cookbook" job. But I honestly have a very difficult time believing that she worked full time, commuted, did the grocery shopping, cooked every single recipe in the book, wrote a blog, and yet still had time to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I mean, really, does anyone that gave this book five stars actually cook?!) She does make the point very clear that she didn't clean at all that year. And she did allow herself to gain an untold amount of weight rather than work out. I suppose that gave her a little extra time to devote to this project. And on top of all that she expected her husband and her friends to support her insanity, wholeheartedly and unabashedly. Eric should have kept a blog for the year about putting up with Julie!

For a book about cooking, there is a sad lack of description regarding the various recipes. Sure, she does go into detail about excavating bone marrow and dismembering lobsters, but what about the food? I didn't get the impression that she actually loves food so much as that she has a gluttonous relationship to it. Don't want to deal with your feelings? That's okay, just stuff them down with extremely high fat foods and ignore the consequences. I have no patience for this sort of self defeatist behavior; the average overweight American who refuses to take responsibility for their own health and instead assumes a false sense of pride over being carefree about their food choices. And then just accepts a dependence upon pharmaceuticals to manage the ill effects. Is it really any wonder that heart disease is the number one cause of death in the United States?

This may have been an entertaining blog, but the "My bleaders like me, they really like me!" tone did not translate very well into a book. If you have any interest whatsoever in her story, save yourself the money (and grief) of reading this book and just read her blog [http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/2002/0...]

I purchased this book as I am acquainted with the movie version where Meryl Streep portrays Julia Child. I have not yet watched the movie, but given that the book is nearly always superior to the movie, I elected to give this one a go.

However, it turned out to be a huge disappointment, worthy of only 1 star AF!!!! My most significant issue with this book is Julie Powell. She is such an unpleasant person, and she became even worse as I continued reading. Initially, I thought perhaps I was being too harsh in my judgment because I typically prefer to like my main characters or at least comprehend their perspectives. But after perusing reviews from others who also gave the book 1 star, I can assert with confidence, "Julie, it's not me, it's you, bitch!!" I mean, halfway through the book, I had to search on Google to discover if she was still married to her husband because she was so extremely mean to him. It's no wonder Julia Child wasn't a fan of hers or her Project.

ALSO, SHE WAS A DISGUSTING SLOB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Her lack of hygiene and slovenly ways were truly revolting and detracted from the overall experience of reading the book.

It seemed so simple, and yet so brilliant, and the perfect type of book for me. I remember thinking this as I perused - I forget what, probably the New York Times - and saw a reference to Julie Powell's Julie and Julia Project.

A woman who dedicated her year to learning how to cook. Like me. I hoped for inspiration - for my writing, for my cooking, for ideas that I could incorporate into both.

I immediately ordered a copy. Or maybe I went straight to Borders after work. I started reading the night I got it. That's how eager I was.

And then I put it down in disgust. It wasn't her language - I'm from New Jersey, I can swear like a sailor and appreciate the release it offers in one's vocabulary. It was her attitude. Whiny. Despairing. Woe-is-me.

That was my first turn-off.

Several months later, I picked it up again, convinced that I had just given it short shrift. It's pretty rare, after all, that I don't bother to finish a book that I've started. I got much farther into the book this time - nearly halfway - and again, I got distracted and annoyed by her writing style. This, I rationalized, may have been because I had started the book all over again from the beginning instead of merely picking up where I left off, giving all of the original prejudices a chance to rear their heads again. I donated the book to a used book store.

And then, in spite of myself, I picked up another copy off of a discount table at Barnes and Noble. Surely, surely the third time would be the charm. Surely the information and hope that I had envisioned were somewhere within the pages of this conceptually brilliant book.

So this time, just last week, I decided to throw it into my weekend travel bag for a 3-hour train ride and give it one last try. I started from where I'd left off, approximately. I read it non-stop for 3 hours. And it did, at last, begin to grow on me. I shared her affinity for Buffy, her inability to make pastry cream even after a dozen practices. I loved her chapter about her murderous rampage of the lobsters in New York City. And here is where I really found the weakness of this book - not in the tone, or the despair, or the language or the attitude. It was actually in the structure of the book itself.

Julie seemed incapable of adhering to a timeline. Everything was an anecdote that tied back to something else. And since she wasn't really writing chronologically, on a recipe-by-recipe basis, each anecdote had to be explained before it could be joined with the cooking example at hand. She interrupted her best chapter, about the lobsters, with a story about being home for Christmas and finding out that her best friend wants to have an affair with a punk rocker from Bath.

Every successive example of seriously good writing was similarly misspent. Her chapter about preparing to cook for a food reporter - interrupted. Her chapter about the final month of the Project - scattered to the winds.

And above all, she doesn't write enough about the food, which is what I really wanted to hear. Yes, I sympathize about her government-secretary-syndrome, but I don't want to hear about how your day sucked, I want to hear about cooking that day's recipe and how it affected your day. Were you mad while you were shopping? Did the recipe turn out? What, for heaven's sake, were you even making? How far into the Project are you?

(These tidbits were scattered across the chapter heads, but there was nothing more specific than that)

Her writing lacked the consideration, the sensuality, even the day-to-day rhythm of, say, Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries. He made everything sound sexy. Even the recipes that failed were still fantastic to read about. It made me think about how to incorporate food and cooking into my daily life and how shopping for lunch can be a hassle, but it can also be the highlight of your day.

Nigel made the food sound sexy. Julie talks about how cooking ruined her sex life. Enough said, right?

I had begun to explore Julie Powell's blog rather late in the process of her writing it. As a result, it was extremely challenging to keep up with her exciting adventures in cooking. I eagerly anticipated the book, hoping that it would refine the diary structure and lead us through a coherent and engaging story. Oh boy, was I let down.

This book is a jumbled collection of anecdotes from Julie Powell's life that deviate from her central narrative without any logical connection. I might have been able to overlook this if the anecdotes were interesting, but unfortunately, they are mostly a peculiar blend of self-boasting and self-criticism. Powell complains about how messy her apartment is while simultaneously congratulating herself for being young and married. She brags about her theater background (and a rather odd story about making a pie for David Straithairn, or perhaps just wishing to make a pie for him - I'm not entirely certain) while constantly whining about her job.

However, the account of cooking through Julia Child's recipes is truly enjoyable to read. I sincerely wish that this book had concentrated more on that aspect, as well as the stories related to shopping for ingredients, preparing the dishes, and serving them, rather than过多地focusing on Julie Powell, the hipster blogger.

So I was with my wife when I picked up my copy for the book club at work.

And of course she started immediately poking fun at my new taste for chick-lit. I was very quick to my own defense, asserting that as non-fiction, it couldn't possibly be chick-lit so there.

However, I was wrong. Because it is non-fiction, but not just about cooking. It's about cooking and her marriage and her friends and their marriages and sex lives and her job and her quarterish life crisis. That didn't make me mad though. What really made me made was how much I enjoyed it. It's funny! And it's a nice story. So what if it actually is complete chick-lit, right? Right?

Anyway, there were some minor things I found irksome. Throughout the Project, Julie mentions that cooking all these recipes have taken a toll on her weight and that she and her husband both have fairly crappy jobs. But she makes almost no mention as to the actual cost of cooking gourmet french food most every night for a year. Surely gelatin and marrow bones do not grow on trees.

Also, while I liked the self-effacing humor of each kitchen nightmare, it would have been nice to be a fly on the wall to one or two more success stories, just to balance things out.

Overall I think Julie Powell convinced me that she is someone I might want to hang out with, but that's about it.

If you read this, just skip over the made-up parts about Julia and her husband because they are boring and, well, dumb.

I vividly remember Julie from high school, and it seems that she hasn't changed much over the years. Some of the remarks she made about people from our past were catty and completely untrue.

Not only that, but many parts of the book were poorly written. One has to wonder if there was any proper editing at all.

It is truly sad that after all this time, she just can't move past things that weren't the way she portrayed them. She even hints at writing a future book about her experience with her "damaging drama teacher".

Frankly speaking, Larry would probably laugh his ass off at that. As for me, that is definitely not a book I would be interested in reading.

I don't see the point in dwelling on the past and creating false narratives. It would be much better if she could focus on more positive and meaningful things in her life.

Maybe then, she could produce something that is worth reading and that could have a positive impact on others.

In the immortal words of Michael Bluth: "I don't know what I expected."

I was fully aware of what I was getting into when I decided to read this book. It's a well-known fact that Julie Powell is a delusional asshole. Just look at the reviews for her second book, Cleaving. They all essentially say, "Wow, turns out Julie Powell is horrible." Even if I hadn't known this, the fact that I skip the Julie parts whenever I watch the movie adaptation of Julie and Julia speaks volumes. And it's not because of the actress; even Amy Adams, who is like literal human sunshine, can't make that woman appealing in any way.

The whole reason I got this book from the library was because the movie was on TV the other day, and I got morbidly curious about Julie Powell's side of the story. I had already read Julia Child's My Life in France, which was the inspiration for the Julia parts of the movie. So, I thought it only made sense to complete the experience and read Powell's book.

Powell wastes no time showing her readers exactly what kind of monster she is. On page eight (yes, just eight!), we get to see Powell's version of an Oprah "Ah-ha moment." I already mentioned this in one of my status updates, but it's important to fully explain this scene. Basically, Powell is waiting in the subway one day and witnesses a woman with a salt-and-pepper crew cut, who looks like she might be mentally disabled, plop down on the concrete behind her. The woman then starts smacking her forehead with the heel of her palm and yelling, "Fuck!" over and over again. She even smacks her forehead hard on the ground. And Powell's response? She thinks, "Ugh, same." Seriously? How much of a selfish, raging narcissist do you have to be to watch a clearly mentally ill person having a disturbing episode and think that? And then she has the nerve to record this scene in her memoir and frame it as some kind of profound breakthrough moment for herself. Gee, thanks a lot, Julie Powell.

So, anyway, Powell starts working her way through Julia Child's cookbook and keeping a blog about her progress. (This means we get a delightfully dated scene where Powell's husband suggests she start a blog, and Julie is like, "What the hell is a blog?") As many reviewers have pointed out, the blog-to-memoir transition was done pretty clumsily. The scenes are out of sequence, and the structure is nonsensical. Powell will start a chapter about some recipe she was working on and then break for a lengthy flashback that has almost no relation to the beginning of the chapter. It's very difficult to follow her progress through the cookbook, and all the flashbacks and timeline-skipping make it hard to know where you are in the project.

Along with the messy structure, another big issue with the book is that Powell is not a great writer. She's trying to be self-depreciating, but it just comes across as annoying. She tells us that she knows she's being horrible, but that doesn't make it any better. Her prose is often unreadable, like this excerpt: "My mother is a clean freak, my father a dirty bird, semi-reformed. Between them, they have managed to raise one child who by all accounts could not care less about basic cleanliness, but whose environs and person are always somehow above reproach, and another child who sees as irrevocable humiliation any imputation of less than impeccable housekeeping or hygiene, and yet, regardless of near-constant near-hysteria on the subject, is almost always an utter mess." What the hell does that even mean?

And that's what really sets Julie Powell apart from Julia Child. Child loved to cook, and it showed in her writing. Powell, on the other hand, clearly does not. Her project and every recipe she describes are presented as nothing more than a chore. There's no joy in her book, no love for the dishes she prepares. And a lot of what she writes is just gross. Her kitchen is always a disaster, and she even discovers maggots living under her dish rack. I'm done.

With Julie and Julia, Julie Powell has managed to do the unthinkable: she wrote a cooking memoir that didn't make me feel hungry, not once in three hundred pages. I'm pretty sure that's a capital offense in some countries.

I read The Scavengers Guide to Haute Cuisine, and I was truly enamored with it. I had the assumption that this particular book would follow a similar vein. Well, to my disappointment, it didn't. Instead of being a book solely focused on the art of cooking, it was centered around a rather whiny, pseudo-intellectual woman who attempts to cook because her life is otherwise in a rather sorry state.

Seriously, one has to wonder how cooking an entire Julia Child cookbook is supposed to miraculously improve her life. In fact, there's no need to even try to explain it because that's precisely the premise of this book, and quite frankly, it just didn't work for me.

Oh, and let's not forget about reading about her husband. It was truly cringe-worthy. This man drinks vodka tonics, gets shaving tips from GQ, and has regular, uncontrollable vomiting episodes. Come on, guy! Maybe when your balls finally make their way down from your body cavity, you can pen a book about that. Then both you and your wife can have these lackluster books published.

For the sake of fairness in my review, I managed to get through just over half of this before I became so repulsed that I simply couldn't bring myself to read any further. Maybe, just maybe, it turns out to be an awesome book in the end. Maybe she successfully cooks all the recipes. Maybe her husband and her friends actually develop into interesting characters. But you know what? I highly doubt it. I'm quite certain that I would derive ten times more entertainment from simply smelling my fingers than I would from finishing this book.

Okay, let's talk about light fare. It can be really enjoyable and fun. She, Julia Child, is quite a funny person at times. When you read about her, you'll learn a whole bunch of interesting things regarding French cooking. You'll discover just how insane the French can be sometimes in their thoughts about how food should be prepared. It's truly fascinating. However, be warned that you'll likely get hungry a lot while reading this. But there's more. Through the excerpts from her letters, you also get to catch a glimpse of Julia Child's funny, and sometimes even foul-mouthed, off-air personality. It adds an extra layer of charm and authenticity to her already captivating story. It's like getting to know a whole new side of her that you might not have expected.

Recently, I watched the new documentary on Julia Child, which was excellent. This led me to re-watch Nora Ephron's delightful film adaptation. In turn, that made me want to read the book. I initially thought it would be just Julie's yearlong blog in book format. However, in reality, only about a quarter or less of the book is actually from the blog. Most of it讲述了Ms. Powell and her family/friends during that year. There is perhaps too much about the romantic life of her girlfriends, maybe to cater to the intended chick-lit audience. What I was really interested in were those blog pieces detailing her cooking of all 524 dishes in Child's seminal cookbook. So, I found that online and read it simultaneously with the first part of the book. But after a while, they got a bit 'same-y', and I realized they are better read a few at a time. I finished the book and am about 2/3 through the blog, which I will finish in time. As a foodie/cook myself, I found both fun and charming and light/breezy. But actually, I'd advise skipping the book and just seeing the movie!

A light yet diverting recount of an early 2000's blogger's journey to complete all of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking recipes within one year. It's truly fascinating to read about the blogger's experiences and challenges along the way. The description of the various recipes makes you almost feel as if you're in the kitchen with them.

I was particularly intrigued by the mention of the potato and leek soup. It sounds so delicious that I really want to give it a try now. However, when it comes to most of the other recipes, my interest is not quite as high. Maybe it's because they seem a bit more complicated or perhaps they involve ingredients that I'm not as familiar with.

I added this book to my nonfiction reading list for November this year after learning that the author had just passed away. I thought it would be a fitting tribute to explore her work and gain a better understanding of her culinary legacy. I'm looking forward to delving into the pages and seeing what other culinary delights await me.

In order to give her life some definition, and perhaps to put blinders on the approaching milestone of her 30th birthday, Julie Powell makes a rather audacious decision. She resolves to cook every single recipe from Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume One" within the span of one year.

She embarks on this culinary adventure in her tiny New York apartment, cooking a wide variety of dishes that range from delicate tarts to rather unusual items like cow brains. The book has a charm that can be likened to a combination of Bridget Jones and Julia Child herself. It is filled with humor, interesting anecdotes, and even a touch of inspiration.

Julie is refreshingly candid about both her personal life and the results of what she calls the Julie/Julia project, which she meticulously documents on her blog, of course. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has a desire to make small but meaningful changes in their life, yet always seems to put those intentions on an ever-growing to-do list.

Beyond her humorous writing style, her love for "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", and her obvious blogging obsession, I find myself truly admiring the simplicity of her choice. As she so eloquently explains and demonstrates in the book, simplicity does not necessarily mean easy. I am truly astounded by the magnitude of the response her project has generated and the profound impact it has had on others.

I am so incredibly glad that I read this book! In fact, as soon as I finished reading it, I felt an overwhelming urge to run out and buy copies for everyone I know. It is just that wonderful! (Written Thursday Jan. 24, 2008)