Julie And Julia: My Year Of Cooking Dangerously

3.5 stars

Julie Powell is coming up on her 30th birthday and is a secretary. She decides she will embark on a one-year project - to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's cookbook, Mastering the Fine Art of French Cooking, and to blog about it.

I liked this. Not as much as the movie, but the movie also incorporated My Life in France by Julia Child, so it was a mix of the two (and I haven't read My Life in France yet, but I plan to). But I still quite enjoyed this. I am not a foodie, but this may even be more enjoyable for those who are, with all the descriptions of the food. Actually, I'm a picky eater and some of that food... well, eeew! But, it was fun to read about Julie's mishaps in the kitchen! I don't like to cook, and I have to say that this book just says it all! It's just way too much effort!!! But, fun to read about. I also enjoyed the relationships that Julie made with her "bleaders" (what she called her blog readers), and how those developed.

*** SPOILERS ALERT!! ***

I like to cook. Most of the time, I'm good with thinking up dinner recipes - or finding ones in cookbooks, baking cakes, cookies, and whatnot, and just creating things in the kitchen. Sometimes I need motivation. When I started reading Julie Powell's book Julie and Julia I felt very motivated. After reading the first chapter, I dug out my cookbooks and planned meals for the next couple days. And I really enjoyed cooking them.

Halfway through the book I realized that it was all pretty much the same thing happening. Julie cooks Julia's recipes - they either turn out well or they're garbage. She works her way through the entire Mastering the Art of French Cooking book, eating things like liver, duck, marrow, etc. She swears, she cries, her husband helps her at times, she feeds friends and family, she writes on her blog (which was a pretty new concept when she had started blogging). At this halfway point, I realized that while Julie is "finding herself" while cooking, it's also the same thing over and over again. She cooks, they eat, she goes to her day job, people notice her blog and she experiences a bit of fame.

After this point, I put the book down. I was bored. She cooked. She wasn't a cleaner (maybe I'm a clean freak, but the thought of those little black flies in my kitchen, and the part with the maggots just didn't sit well with me - who lets their kitchen get that way?). She was gaining weight because of the sheer amount of fat used in the cooking. She didn't like her office job because it wasn't helping her discover herself. Blah, blah, blah.

I started reading Julie and Julia at the beginning of November. Now, at the beginning of December, after reading 4 other books, I've finished reading it. I didn't feel enlightened after finishing the book. In fact, I didn't even feel the urge to cook anymore.

Julie Powell is a decent writer, though she does stray from topic to topic throughout the book. One thing would remind her of another and she'd go off talking about something else. As a reader, I didn't feel intrigued to get to the end of the book - I assumed she'd work her way to the end of MtAoFC and discover herself. It wasn't like reading a regular fiction book - there was no suspense, no intrigue, no mystery. In fact, by the end of the book there were a few endings (where Julie felt the need to write "The End". Twice.) where I just thought to myself, "Finish it already!"

By the end of the book, Julie cooks her final dish well, but still doesn't really know how to cook. I don't want to toot my own horn, but I do find myself to be slightly more capable in the kitchen which might be why I couldn't relate to Julie. When something goes wrong, I'm not swearing. I don't let the dishes pile up for days. Cooking is more therapeutic for me rather than a chore (which is what the Julie/Julia Project seemed to be like for Julie). I'm not the best cook in the world - in fact, far from it - but I manage. After following a "how to" cookbook for a year I would think I'd be better in the kitchen, just as I thought Julie would have turned into a better chef than she was at the start of the book.

I'm very interested to watch the movie with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams - perhaps it'll keep my interest more than the book did.

On another note, at the end of the book there is an excerpt from Julie Powell's next book Cleaving: a Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession. After reading bits of that excerpt, I noticed it was the same kind of writing as in Julie and Julia and I really don't see myself purchasing it. I'm not sure why, after writing a memoir about food, Julie would write yet another memoir about food. Instead of working her way through a cookbook, she's discovering herself as a butcher. Wow. Maybe she's just trying to stretch out those 15 minutes of fame.

I think I would give the book 2 stars out of 5. Now, we'll see how the movie fares.

I read this book over the course of one of my Saturday shifts at work. The call volume was low and I had time between calls to motor through this book. Julie & Julia is a fast and very easy read. That doesn't to say it's too simple to really care about, because it isn't. I would have given it five stars, because I did like it quite a lot, but I'm not a fan of letters interjecting narrative. They pull me right out of the story and I don't find them all that interesting.

But I enjoyed hearing of Julie's adventures in the kitchen. I dare say I liked it so much better than the movie. But usually that's the case with movies and books they're based on, am I right?

...definitely not my favorite book....it wasnt horrible and I would recommend it to people if they were out of ideas but overall its not great.

I got this book as a gift and it sat at the bottom of a pile of books for a couple of weeks. Then I was at a salon going through a magazine and there was an excerpt of Julie Powell's next book and apparently she had an affair after the cooking project, and in that little excerpt there was so much humour and drama- well I had to go home and start reading ' Julie and Julia' ...and it was so hilarious! She is a little crazy and thats what made this book even more enjoyable.

I recently watched the movie version of this book and I was immediately drawn to Julie. Her life and mine are so similar, it's crazy. (I even share her love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer...HAHAHA.) I can see myself doing what she did, maybe not to the extent that she did, but at least 75-80% of it. So, I decided that I would read her book, to see if it was as good as the movie. So far, I LOVE it. I love her comments, her sense of humor, and the way that she describes her cooking fiascos. (I just finished reading about the bone marrow incident, and I loved it...as gross as it was, lol, it was still funny reading it.)
Anyhow, I recommend this book to anyone and everyone. 2 thumbs up :)

I read this book before seeing the movie and am glad that I did as there are some subtle scenes included in the book that were not in the movie. Powell's account of her year cooking through Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child brings alive the chaos that her life must have been at the time! The lobster tales are so funny that you can't help but laugh out loud. There was less about Julia Child in the book but that did not detract in any way. This book was good enough to convince me to buy her next one, "Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession."

I had a lot of fun reading this book. Made me want to attempt a project like this myself, or at least eat more french food.

Put succinctly I had a love/hate relationship with Julie Powell's book Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. Unlike some of her critics I do applaud Powell's leap from the world of blogging into that of a published author. Many of her detractors have made it all about the food but that wasn't why she embarked on 524 Recipes in 365 days; Jennie Yabroff in her Newsweek article Stop Hating Julie Powell, Please covers this well.

What Ms. Powell did need was someone to remind her that when people stop reading your words for free and start laying down money for your book, you then have an obligation to give them a reasonably professional product and that is where she just doesn't deliver. Some of her word choices and phrasing were barely at a high school grammar 101 level. Attempts to be avant guard through drawing on sexual encounters (hers and those of her friends), a preoccupation with her own body odors and the ad nauseum descriptions about the grunge and filth of her apartment were imitations of twenty-something writers who had gone before her and who have done it so much better.

When she isn't trying so hard and returns to the realness of her life the book improves. I enjoyed reading about the bona fide world of Julie Powell. This is also where she stops being a blogger and remembers that she is an author as her prose takes us through the drudgery of her day job, her escalating enthusiasm for cooking, to her growing obsession with completing the project Mastering the Art of French Cooking and even her feelings for Julia Child.

It was a stark contrast indeed that while reading Julie & Julia I came across an excerpt from Elizabeth McCracken's book 'An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination'. After years of reading it is not often that one can still stumble on an author who really draws you in.

She has a wonderful style that never slips into some of the slickness that so many do. She writes about life events and emotions with a refreshing clarity and where I really felt a connection was her sense of humor; the 'dwarves of grief' that she refers to will forever have a place in my imagination and I will definitely be ordering one of her books for my winter reading

Authors such as Elizabeth McCracken provide a quality source of reading pleasure, and while pop culture figures such as Julie Powell may stretch their 15 minutes of fame into 30; I for one won't be finding the time to read any more of her books.

I really like the writing syle. Her nice dry humour is makes me smile and nod. It is honest and realistic, something us common folk can relate too.

I thought it would be more about Julia as well as Julie but I loved Julie's idea of who Julia was.

I had to stop reading by page 180. It was torture just to get through the first few chapters. You hope that it gets better but it doesn't. Its boring and I became very agitated when I was reading this book. The writing as well as the character irritated me.

This is a fun, light-hearted account of one woman's attempt to get her life back on track. It's not a cookbook or a step-by-step book on how to start a blog, become a writer or even how to cook, but it is a fun read.

I really didn't like this book. It seemed very off-topic, self-involved, and incredibly boring.

I was expecting more of a book about cooking and the recipes and actually about her "cooking dangerously", but instead learned more than I ever cared to know about the personal lives of people she knew, and about how she was amused at people online objecting to her using the f-word often in her blog posts.

I have written a more in-depth review here: http://eclecticbookshelf.com/?p=12

I started reading this book after watching the movie in the theatre this past Summer. All I can say is that the movie depicted Julie Powell as a nice, sweet, some what eccentric individual who went throught the year working on cooking her way through Julia Child's cook book.

But after reading it 3/4 way through the book, I found her extremely talentless, as well an annoying selfish individual. They writing itself is filled with anger, swearing and most of all, stuff I didn't care much.

This is one of the books you will find in a bargain bin at Christmas time at a local grocery store.

Where and why you would read this book?
A: I was bored and there is nothing good on the television. I read this mostly in bed, it made me tired and feel sorry on how Julie Powell has a bad hygiene issue, as well a fear that her husband will divorce her.

This was a story I had hard time to make an opinion on.
At the end, I can say that even though I could do without some of the images suggested by the story, I could not help but admire the honesty of the writer. It takes a special person to lay things out just the way they are, without embellishments and/or disguise. It also takes a special person to appreciate this narrative just the way it is…

This isn't a classic. It's "cute" and I wouldn't read her next one. One is enough..... There are life lessons that we all could learn from her so there are redeeming qualities.

With all the hype surrounding the movie, I was eager to dig into Julie & Julia. Unfortunately, I found the story of Julie to be dull and it dragged on too long. Her challenge and quest to get of a life rut was interesting, but not entertaining.

"Julie and Julia" by Julie Powell is the story of Julie Powell writing blogs about her journey through Julia Child's famous book "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". Julie decides to cook her way through every recipe in the book within a year and write about her experiences in a blog.

I was expecting a great book about food and about the history of Julia Child and about the experiences of a novice cook, cooking her way through Julia's cookbook. What I got was a story about drinking, swearing, sex and friends with a bit of the stuff I was looking for.

I did not become attached to Julie Powell and could not relate to her problems and how she handled her life. Do people really drink that much? Being a self proclaimed foodie I wanted so much more about the cooking experience itself instead of all the personal trauma and whining that Julie writes about...it was an agitating read.

When Julie breaks down after being given a speech on how she should start having children before it's too late one too many times, her husband Eric helps her come up with a project to take her mind off things; cook all recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking within a year. That's 524 recipes and some are not for the faint of heart. This includes aspic, liver, kidneys, chopping up a live lobster, and even brain.

Julie took to the internet to blog her progress, which is how we ended up with this book. The book was quirky and cute. Interspersed in the book though are letters from Paul Child, Julia's husband. These felt incredibly out of place. Don't go into this book expecting it to be more about Julia Child than Julie Powell, or expecting to find out anything new about Julia Child. This is really just a documentation of a cooking experiment, the way things can go horribly wrong in the kitchen, and life in New York City.

This book isn't the best written book in the world, nor the most interesting, but if you're looking for a quick fun read this shouldn't disappoint.