I've started reading Julie & Julia, the book that came from The Julie/Julia Project blog.
The idea was that Julie Powell was going to cook every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year... in her small New York apartment kitchen.
So far, I'm not too impressed with the book. The original blog is pretty entertaining, but in book form it's just not working for me. There are these fictionalized accounts of Julia Child's life that completely break the flow, and I'm not really sure why anyone would be interested in Julia Child fiction anyway. I suspect that the book deal might have been based on creating a certain amount of new material that hadn't appeared in the blog or something.
I also wish the book would talk more about the food. The book seems focused on the personal dramas surrounding such a huge undertaking, but somehow I just haven't gotten drawn in enough to care about the author's brother, or her friend Sally, or the fact that Julie and her husband aren't having sex all that often. I would be interested in the trials and tribulations of classic French cuisine in a shitty apartment kitchen, though.
I'm sticking with it, for now. Maybe it'll grow on me, but my first impression is that the blog was more interesting than the book. But what do I know? She did score a six-figure advance on Julie & Julia, and I read somewhere that the advance on her next book was significantly larger, although of course I can't find a source now that I'm looking for it.
