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Friday, August 22, 2008
you too can turn your angst into a writing career...
Ti: Julie and Julia
Au:Julie Powell
Released in HC 2005
bookmark: i'm not very good at using bookmarks and generally just skimmed several pages until i could remember where i was...
food books are a new thing for me for whatever reason. with any hope, this will inspire me to cook more often. this book, in fact gave me the idea to make a goal of cooking at least one thing from each cookbook i own, as there is a nice sized bookcase of them in our dinner roomette.
Julie Powell has a crap job working as a secretary in an "unamed" government office in NYC right after 9/11, and this government office is rather heavily involved in dealing with the public's reaction to the event and it's aftermath. lofty as this sounds, she's a secretary who answers calls from nutcases and runs her butt of doing menial work. and most of her coworkers are big republicans. depressing all around.
on a visit home to texas she's inspired to steal her mother's copy of 'the art of french cooking' vol 1 by Julia Child, and endeavors to cook each and every recipe in the book in one year. her husbands suggests that she track her progress in using a novel new bit of technology - a BLOG.
through her adventures, Julie picks up blog readers ["bleaders"] and the attention of many media outlets. given the large number of blogs that are turned into books today, it makes me hope that some of those authors have read this book so that they can feel a little solidarity with Julie - it's a little odd to go from annonymous to famous for doing something in the privacy of your own home and assuming that no one is really paying attention.
anyway, i'm glad that the author was able to swing her blog into a book and that a former co-worker of mine recommended it and that i remembered that i wanted to read it when i spotted a remaindered copy in TN. i'm sure many people hanging out in the quarter-life crisis bubble can relate to the need to accomplish something when other parts of your life are not where you'd thought they'd be. a few of the memiors i've read lately that i've liked seem to have shared a common mode of communication, in which the authors feel free to share with the world the sort of crazy things that happen in their head, as opposed to just a narrative of what's happened in the lives. in this case, a crazy thing that may happen is completely loosing your sh!t over say, pastry dough, or doing an imitation of Julia Child aloud while cooking and not having ANY idea that you're doing it or remember it later.
also...if you read the book to the end, you'll find out a really good reason to keep up on your house keeping. i was quite motivated.Labels: 9/11, bone marrow, food, quarter-life crisis
posted by ~e at
8:49 PM
1 Comments:
I'm a little unsettled by the bone marrow tag. Is that a common French ingredient, a reference to chronic health effects suffered by those near Ground Zero, or do her house-keeping habits mentioned at the end somehow lead to or prevent leukemia?
8/25/2008 10:42 AM
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