#book review: Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen

taken from Goodreads:

"With the humor of Bridget Jones and the vitality of Augusten Burroughs, Julie Powell recounts how she conquered every recipe in Julia Child+s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and saved her soul. Julie Powell is 30-years-old, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a soul-sucking secretarial job that+s going nowhere. She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged assignment. She will take her mother+s dog-eared copy of Julia Child+s 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she will cook all 524 recipes. In the span of one year. At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the simple Potage Parmentier (potato soup) into the more complicated realm of aspics and crpes, she realizes there+s more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the eye. With Julia+s stern warble always in her ear, Julie haunts the local butcher, buying kidneys and sweetbreads. She sends her husband on late-night runs for yet more butter and rarely serves dinner before midnight. She discovers how to mold the perfect Orange Bavarian, the trick to extracting marrow from bone, and the intense pleasure of eating liver.And somewhere along the line she realizes she has turned her kitchen into a miracle of creation and cuisine. She has eclipsed her life+s ordinariness through spectacular humor, hysteria, and perseverance."

I have had this book sitting on my shelf for a couple of years now; I kept meaning to pick it up and read it, especially once news of the movie version was announced, but there were always other books that seemed to catch my eye first. So it sat, collecting dust, until I saw Powell's most recent book at the library and checked it out. Now, I'm anal enough about my books that I knew I'd have to read the first one first, so I did. And there's so much I want to say about this book and this author and this whole blog-to-book concept, that I can hardly put it into order in my head. So I'm just going to put it out there in bullet-point format and let you make of it what you can.

• I haven't seen the movie, but I've heard the buzz. And I can imagine that the casting of Amy Edwards (she who seems to be all sweetness and light) has likely skewed the public's opinion on the real Julie Powell (at least, continuing blog comments imply that's the case). In any case, I found nothing sweet nor light about Julie Powell; instead, I found her to be whiny, self-centered, brash, crude, and more than a little batshit-crazy. To be honest, there were times when I liked and was entertained by her personality, but by the end of the book, her meltdowns had just worn me out.
• In many instances, when bloggers are given book contracts, much of the book content is pulled directly from the blog content. (That was my main complaint with Heather Armstrong's book -- nothing in the book added to the content already on the blog.) With Powell's book, though, it seems she really expanded upon the material in the blog, so that the book comes across as a much better-written, more fleshed-out version of the material on her blog. There's a lot of transfer from one to the other, but as I wasn't a follower of her blog in the first place, I didn't feel as though I were just getting a rehashing of the blog's content.
• I'm just not sure what the point of the blog project was. Why Julia Childs? Why this cookbook? Powell addresses those questions a couple of times (because she apparently was asked them constantly) but I don't feel that she ever gave any sort of credible answer. Had the book focused more on the recipes and the food, perhaps that connection might have been clearer. Instead, it seems that Powell is just a glutton for punishment and prefers to inflict these sorts of histrionics on her friends and family as well.
• For all the hype surrounding this book as the first of the foodie-blog projects, there's not much foodie here. Yes, she talks about preparing a number of recipes from the book, but in my eyes, Powell isn't a good food writer. Not like Molly Wizenberg, for example, who writes BEAUTIFULLY about food and is able to work in great stories about her life and her family in the process. 
• I'm reminded quite a bit of Elizabeth Gilbert (who apparently raved about this bok) when I read this memoir, and my complaint with this one is similar to my complaint with Eat Pray Love. Books like this require some type of change, of transformation. The process, the journey, needs to make a difference in the author, and I just don't see that happening here. Which again, brings me back to the question: What's the point? I'm not even sure how Powell got a book contract out of this whole deal.

Eh, that's enough complaining. I was just disappointed by the whole thing. The only good that really came out of me reading this book is the fact that it's now in my "trade at McKay's" pile instead of taking valuable shelf space.