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Ahhhh, so I've finished the book now and what do I have to say about it? Well what do you always say when your comparing a book to the film nine times out of ten?....the books so much better!
In fact I've only come across a handful of books that are worse then the film version- Jaws being the main one (hooper had an affair with mrs brody and the writing was abysmal) love the film by the way and have a fairly funny story about how i ruined one of my blokes gigs with that film. Oh and stephen King books tend to make amazing films but aren't so great in of themselves, ie the shawshank redemption, the green mile and the shining (cried at the first and second and pooped my pants to the last one whilst watching it on my own late at night)
So what was so much better I bet your wondering? Well to answer that I have to let you in on a few more prejudices and obsessions of mine to be fair in the cold light of objectiveness.
As soon as Julie Powell mentioned in the first chapter that she has an obsession with a certain teenaged vampire slayer I knew that I was gonna like her.
Seriously my own Buffy/ Joss Whedon obsessiveness knows no bounds. A general rule of thumb is if you like buff buff as I like to call it, I'll like you.
To me Buffy is the quintessentially perfect piece of fantasy tv drama ever created and I'm still waiting for something to fill the void that it left on tv.
Supernatural came close but no cigar, the writing isn't nearly so clever.
Anyhow enough with the Buffy talk (for now) what about the book? I personally feel that the film did Julie a bit of a disservice character wise. The film focused on her whining, crying and tantrums instead of her witty cynicism's and the like.
I didn't like her in the film much but in the book I really connected with her, she admits that that she's a terrible housewife and that she says fuck far too much.
These are both things that I do too much myself, I felt an instant connection over these aswel.
The thing that really makes you connect with her though is how lost she feels in her own life.
Most of us know the feeling of being in a crappily paid and generally crap job, knowing we want to do something else but we don't actually know what.
This is what inspires Julie to start the project and when I think about it, I'm amazed and inspired that anyone actually managed to cook all the recipes from any book let alone mastering the art of French cooking.
When I go through any cookbook there are recipes that I look at and know that straight away I won't be cooking.
I've got both volumes of Julia Childs cookbook and Im going to say that some of those recipes are damn intimidating!
Another thing that strikes you straight away is how much this book says about blogging and bloggers in general.
She started it as a way to reach out to other people, we all want to connect to others and bloggers are doing this on a grand scale.
Somewhere on the net there will be others who think like you, where you can have a meaningful conversation about whatever it is that gets you going.
The special thing about blogs is that you set the conversation and the readers come to you.
It's also lovely to see the relationship that Julie creates with the Julia inside her head, now she has the benefit of having seen her on tv and she uses her as a role model and feels that when she's channeling her that she's a better person.
It seems amusing to me that basing your idea on person from their cookbooks is rather dangerous, E David sounds ever so proper in her books. Yet she was a hard drinking, chain smoking feisty woman who had affairs with married men, awesome but I'm not sure I'd want to channel her on a daily basis.
What Julie gets from her project is hard to define in words, it's that structure and sense of accomplishment that we all crave.
She also picks up some great cooking skills on the way, and her love of food and cooking even when it's pissing her off shines through in her writing. It's also a damned funny book.
This book was to me worth the hype, I loved it and it got me out of this reading rut I've been in for so long.
For reading questions go over to
lit loversSorry it's been so long again I'll be back with some recipes very soon.
Oh by the way, Elizabeth David wrote a lovely blurb for the front of mastering the art of French cooking but I still have no idea if they ever actually met.