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July 28
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Rachelle
marked as to-read:
Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family (Paperback)
by Patricia Volk
bookshelves:
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my rating:
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July 07
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Rachelle
gave
to:
Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (Hardcover)
by Julie Powell
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my rating:
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read in June, 2008
Rachelle said:
"I wanted to love this book. Honest. I love to cook. I love to read about cooking. The premise of the book had everything going for it. Unfortunately I didn't heed Courtney's review before I started reading...
I feel like the publisher and marketin...more
I wanted to love this book. Honest. I love to cook. I love to read about cooking. The premise of the book had everything going for it. Unfortunately I didn't heed Courtney's review before I started reading...
I feel like the publisher and marketing team got a little off track as they describe in the flap copy all about Julie's mission to create the wonderful and odd dishes that Julia Child included in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Yes, this was the basis for the story. However, the summary should have instead read "Follow along as we regurgitate the blog content written by a very whiny woman who fancies herself a chef and a writer but is, in fact, merely a worker drone who hates her job (and goes on and on about hating her job). She swears her way through the 524 recipes in MtAoFC and screams at her husband and cries a lot and really doesn't talk about the cooking any more than she talks about hating her job or about her friends' love lives or her miserable existence in her tiny kitchen in her tiny apartment in Long Island City where no one will visit her unless she cooks for them. Boo hoo."
Okay, a tad below the belt, but seriously! I happened to read one or two reader reviews of this book before I picked it up, and I thought one reviewer was just sensitive and prissy for commenting on the amount of swearing in this book. Oh no. I'm no prim and proper lady, but for crying out loud, every single page has no fewer than five instances of f*** among other expletives. Sheesh! You really have to wade through them all to get to the content, and when you do you just get tired of reading how unfortunate she is for having to work at a job she hates and how damn frustrated she is at not being able to make gelatin or pastry dough or what-have-you.
Now I gave this book two stars because I didn't absolutely hate it (no matter what it sounds like). But I far from loved it. As I said, I really really really wanted it to be good, and I gave Julie plenty of chances (the entire book, in fact) to make me like her, or at least sympathize or find her charming or something.
I do think it's an admirable feat to have made her way through that entire cookbook in a year and to have had some great results and epiphanies (occasionally, though most of those are completely glossed over). But I really wish I didn't feel the urge to roll my eyes at most of the story that came between.
P.S. I just read that she won a Quills Award for this book. WTF?...less
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Rachelle
read and liked
Jonathan's
review of Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen:
"I read The Scavengers Guide to Haute Cuisine, and I really liked it. I figured this book would be along the same lines. Yeah, well, it wasn't. Instead of a book about cooking, it was a book about a whiny, pseudo-intellectual woman who tries to coo...more
I read The Scavengers Guide to Haute Cuisine, and I really liked it. I figured this book would be along the same lines. Yeah, well, it wasn't. Instead of a book about cooking, it was a book about a whiny, pseudo-intellectual woman who tries to cook because her life is otherwise crappy. Please tell me how cooking an entire Julia Child cookbook will improve your life. Actually, don't, because that is the premise for this book and it sucked.
Oh, and reading about her husband was cringe-worthy. This wimp drinks vodka tonics, gets shaving tips from gq, and has regular, uncontrollable vomiting episodes. Hey guy, maybe when your balls finally descend from your body cavity you can write a book about that. Then both you and your wife can have lame books published.
For the sake of fair reviewing, I only made it through just over half of this before I became too repulsed to read on. So maybe it turns out awesome. Maybe she gets all the recipes cooked. Maybe her husband and her friends actually become interesting. I guess I'll never find out, because I know I'd derive ten times more entertainment from smelling my fingers than I would by finishing this book....less
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Rachelle
read and liked
devra's
review of Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen:
"it seemed so simple, and so brilliant and so the perfect type of book for me, i remember thinking 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 ye...more
it seemed so simple, and so brilliant and so the perfect type of book for me, i remember thinking 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 abotu 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 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?...less
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Rachelle
read and liked
Jennifer's
review of Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously:
"I love the concept, I really do; not so much the finished product.
Had she not made the fuuny reference to my favorite line in Casablanca near the begininning of the book, I never would have been able to finish it. The thought of finding another ...more
I love the concept, I really do; not so much the finished product.
Had she not made the fuuny reference to my favorite line in Casablanca near the begininning 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, melodramtic, 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 blogs.salon.com/0001399/2002/0...
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Rachelle
read and liked
Courtney's
review of Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen:
"Did not love like I had hoped I would. I am a HUGE Julia Child fan and I love the whole idea of cooking every recipe from Julia's MTAOFC in a year and blogging about it. However, I wish I was aware of the blog when she was actually in the midst of th...more
Did not love like I had hoped I would. I am a HUGE Julia Child fan and I love the whole idea of cooking every recipe from Julia's MTAOFC in a year and blogging about it. However, I wish I was aware of the blog when she was actually in the midst of the year long project, rather than reading her synopsis years later in book form.
I have to say however, that Julie is frickin' funny. I laughed out loud several times and appreciated her wicked honesty, but the book just did not work as a whole.
Did anyone else feel this way?
Also, I have to give props to the cover of the hardback version--AWESOME! The paperback however, looked like a crappy chick-lit book :-(
...less
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Rachelle
is currently reading:
My Life in France (Hardcover)
by Julia Child
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
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Rachelle
is currently reading:
100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask: With Answers from Top Brokers from Around the Country (100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask)
by Ilyce R. Glink
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
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Rachelle
is currently reading:
The Meaning of Wife: A Provocative Look at Women and Marriage in the Twenty-first Century (Paperback)
by Anne Kingston
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Rachelle
is currently reading:
Mortgages 101: Quick Answers to Over 250 Critical Questions About Your Home Loan (Paperback)
by David Reed
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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