Blayne Sucks

This is one of the most hilarious books I have read in a long while. It is called Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. The premise of the book is that a 29 going on 30 secretary named Julie Powell from New York City does something extreme to break the mundane routine that has become her life: she decides to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s famous book Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year.

I know what you’re thinking, but the book isn’t all about cooking. It’s really more of a How-To guide for everyone’s eventual post-college quarter life crisis. You know how it goes. You get to the real world and you finally have “grown-up” by basically every possible standard and there’s nothing. It’s not like you get a prize or anything. You’re just…there. Life is happening and you just have to make your way in the world. This book is one woman’s crazy, hilarious journey to find that inner peace and achieve a level of happiness.

One thing that surprised me is how much I had in common with this woman. We both like playing Civilization, cooking to some degree, and finding the humor in the general idiocy of bureaucracies. It was freaky how many little things there were where I felt a kinship with this woman that I never met. Perhaps it’s just that she comes across as so genuine it’s hard not to find things in the book where you haven’t found yourself in a similar situation.

I can’t recommend the book enough. It’s a crazy project taken on by a woman of arguable sanity, who manages to convey the whole experience in side-splitting fashion. I can’t really even imagine trying to eat 524 French foods in a year, let alone trying to cook them all basically from scratch first.

Of course, there’s a similarity to another book that I read somewhat recently called The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs, which was also extremely good. There’s something about these books that feels like a sort of marathon version of Truth or Dare gone wild. These are the sorts of things that kind of make you just sit back in awe and think “Only in America…” Both of these books are excellent. I’m not sure what Julie Powell’s next book might be, but I know A.J. Jacobs is working on a book about a year living biblically, which is essentially about following the Bible as literally as possible, including all the lesser known rules for an entire year. I will certainly be looking into reading that.