JULIE & JULIA

FINALLY the Julie/Julia Project book has come out! It’s called Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, by Julie Powell, Entertainment Weekly gave it an A, it’s great, and you should read it immediately. (I, dorkily, had it pre-ordered from Amazon. It arrived on Tuesday and I’m already halfway through, reading ravenously. But then, I have read the entire blog’s archives straight through two or three times.) I suffered a moment’s disappointment because I’d been hoping for a straight-up collection of the blog postings in book form (like the Mimi Smartypants book), but it’s more of its own story, though there are excerpts and adaptations from the blog. This is cool in its own way, because there’s a lot of contextual information in it I didn’t know when reading the blog. I could perhaps wish for more actual food descriptions—the book is more like a proper memoir, with reflections on the author’s past, family, and friends, as well as Julia Child biographical snippets, held together by the overarching food theme, but that’s probably what makes it more appealing to the general, non-food-obsessed reader. The blog was food in the foreground, real life hovering in the background, but the book is the opposite. Regardless, it’s wonderfully written and entertaining and I remain eternally jealous of anyone who can parlay their blogging into a lucrative book deal with Little, Brown (although if I were serious about wanting that for myself, I would work a lot harder at writing here instead of resorting to stream-of-consciousness occasional blathering).