Julie and Julia : 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell

And here I go, on a self-indulgent happy bender back into food books. I wish you could see me now, grinning on my couch in my apartment, so cozy back in my food book addiction. 

So I read Julie & Julia...I picked it up at the library mostly because there's a picture of my egg beater on the cover (see below): 

Now, I have a strong affection for my egg beater...so I decided to judge a book by its cover and check this one out. I had also recently decided that it was about time I get back to my happy place filled with food books. 

I did not, though, take a break from reading cookbooks...I have been put in charge of the pumpkin pie at this year's Thanksgiving celebration (and by put in charge I mean asked to be put in charge) and I don't want to disappoint...so I've been testing recipes. I think I've found a good one, but please please please feel free to add a comment/e-mail me if you happen to know of a good recipe. 

But I digress. 

I read Julie & Julia this weekend...it's not a long read. It details the course of Julie Powell's life as she cooks her way through Julia Child's famous book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Volume I). She cooks her way through all of the recipes over the course of a year and blogs about her experiences, eventually compiling the blog entries into a book. You can check out her current blog at www.juliepowell.blogspot.com - but it's no longer about cooking as far as I can tell (and therefore, in my opinion, less worth reading). I want to take this opportunity to push you, once again, towards www.jennsylvania.com - it's really, really funny. Please go there now and see pictures of her pit bull Maisy. 

But I digress again. 

The book was interesting, definitely...although less about food than I had hoped when I picked it up. Powell details the events of her life, her husband's life, her friends lives during the course of her cooking year...which isn't a problem, per se, but just not what I was expecting. I'm rather surprised, in fact, that the book was placed with the other "food books" at the library (next to the cookbooks). Cooking is obviously the central theme of the book, and the whole reason it was written, but I feel like it, in the end, was really more about Powell's rediscovery of self than it was about the food she used to get there. Maybe I should be happier with this outcome, proudly touting this book as evidence that food is a worthwhile and potentially life-defining pursuit, but (and this is where I sound selfish) I care more about food than I do about Julie Powell and her mission to get out of her dead-end secretarial job. Just a thought. 

If you're looking for a true food book, look elsewhere (see other good food books listed in a previous post). If you're looking for a starter food book, check this one out. It's interesting, as I said above, evidenced by the fact that I did read it in two days instead of ignoring it for my Wii (another distraction that has recently strengthened its hold on me given my purchase of Super Mario Galaxy), but it's not filled with the same passion for food that I originally hoped for. 

The Virgin's Lover by Philippa Gregory

The Tudor series by Philippa Gregory is interesting in that the order of the books release does not match the chronological order of the matter dealt with in the books.

Regardless, I managed to read the books completely out of order - both chronological order and order of release. See below for both orders (information gleaned from Wikipedia):

The Tudor series

1. The Other Boleyn Girl (2001)
2. The Queen's Fool (2003)
3. The Virgin's Lover (2004)
4. The Constant Princess (2005)
5. The Boleyn Inheritance (2006)
6. The Other Queen (2008)

Chronologically:

• The Constant Princess (Katherine of Aragon)
• The Other Boleyn Girl (Mary and Anne Boleyn)
• The Boleyn Inheritance (Jane Boleyn, Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard)
• The Queens Fool (A young Jewish Girl's story of her service in the court of Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth Tudor)
• The Virgin’s Lover (Elizabeth I)
• The Other Queen (Mary I, Queen of Scots)

Before I started this blog, I had already read The Constant Princess, The Queens Fool, and The Boleyn Inheritance. All are good, but I think I recommend them in the order that I read them. The Constant Princess is dramatic, The Queens Fool is fun (told from the perspective of a girl outside of the Tudor dynasty and therefore less...what's the word...less intense? stressful?), and the Boleyn Inheritance is just plain messssssssedddd up. Who knows, maybe the Boleyn Inheritance best conveys the feeling in the Tudor Court at the time, but reading the book stressed me out.

Moving on.

The Virgin's Lover is, so far, my least favorite Philippa Gregory book. That said, it still ranks above some of my favorite books by other authors. It's quite interesting, just as richly detailed and tantalizingly dramatic as her other books, but it is just...DENSE. It takes a long time to get through, a long time even for an anti-social reader such as myself. Just keep that in mind before embarking on the project that is reading this book. It's no Crime and Punishment or War and Peace, but it does take a bit of a commitment.

If you're going to pick and choose your way through the Tudor series and you don't mind treating them as separate novels rather than an entire series, I might recommend that you skip The Virgin's Lover....but I will say that there is something more fulfilling, more enriching about reading an entire series, letting the separate novels become one huge story told through multiple points of view...so I can't, in good faith, strongly recommend that you leave this book out entirely. Just maybe read something light beforehand, and have something light lined up on the back end to follow it up.

Big Boned by Meg Cabot

I should mention now that my library habit causes me to frequently read books in a series completely out of order. In this case, the "Heather Wells mystery" series by Meg Cabot, I read book 1, then book 3, and now posses book 2 (it sits on my kitchen table waiting patiently with the rest of its library friends, but now that I have figured out that I managed to read them in that order, I'm not quite sure that I'm going to read book 2 in the end anyway). So, keep that in mind. Learn from my mistakes. 

I'm not really going to say much about the Heather Wells series...or Meg Cabot in general. That's not to say that Meg Cabot isn't worth commenting on, but in terms of level of seriousness, I'm going to put her at the bottom of the totem pole of authors I'm trying to build. Of the books I've read so far, I'm going to say Cabot is the least serious author, followed by Keyes, Lancaster, and Gregory (but keep in mind I'm only ranking fiction authors at this point). Anyway, that's immaterial. 

Cabot is a hugely successful author - most notably author of the Princess Diaries series - and I think it's because of her ability to create fun, lighthearted fiction with believable characters and creative story lines. 

The thing is, Cabot's writing isn't brilliant. She'll entertain you, but she won't transport you to a new time and/or place...she doesn't rank up there with JK Rowling or CS Lewis (did anyone else just realize that those two have two initials as their names? If I ever try to launch a career in fiction, I will officially write under the name of  BE Barry). 

I don't want to discount her talent, I'm just trying to tell you that it lies in a realm of the literary world inhabited by a number of other authors. Final thoughts? Entertaining and fun...but not the kind of book that will make you fall in love with reading, or with Cabot. 

The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory

I'd like to refuse to acknowledge the month of no posting, but I must acknowledge this lapse as it is rather characteristic of myself and my personality...but...I will at least promise to make a concerted effort to stop lapsing in this way. 

So, The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory. I must say that the most challenging thing about this book was learning to spell the title...which I confess I still haven't done. I just looked it up on Amazon again. I did something I rarely do, and I saw the movie before I read the book. I was disappointed to have to do so, but I had been waiting for it to be my turn in the line to check this book out the library for so long, and I really wanted to see the movie, etc...and you get how it turned out. So, my recommendation to you, if you haven't seen the movie, is to read the book before you see the movie. I think the book will enrich the movie more than the movie enriched the book. The movie, as movie adaptations so often do, took liberties with the plot of the book that I wish it hadn't. Anyway, read the book/see the movie to see what I mean. 

I'm not going to lie, this book is about as trashy as trashy historical fiction comes...and it's awesome. It's full of sibling rivalry, courtship, jealousy, royal intrigue...everything you could wish for in a book you read in order to get cheap drugstore novel thrills mixed with somewhat educational historical details thrown in. 

To summarize...the thing I want to communicate in this post is to read the book. Read it if you've already seen the movie, read it first if you haven't seen the movie yet...it's better than the movie. It's delicious. 

Oh, and I now hate Natalie Portman.