I was so distracted by yesterday's computer problems that I forgot to post the chapter and page count.
For the week -
CHAPTERS: 206
PAGES: 2,195
For the year so far -
CHAPTERS: 6,350
PAGES: 80,621
PAGES LEFT TO GET TO THE 100,000 PAGE GOAL: 19,379
WEEKS LEFT OF EXPERIMENT: 8
Today's book, "On a visit to her childhood home in Texas, Julie Powell pulls her mother's battered copy of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking off the bookshelf. And the book calls out to her. Pushing thirty, living in a run-down apartment in Queens, and working at a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell is stuck. Her only hope lies in a dramatic self-rescue mission. And so she invents a deranged assignment: in the space of one year, she will cook every recipe in the Julia Child classic, all 524 of them. And if it doesn't help her make sense of her life, at least she'll eat really, really well. How hard could it be?"
In September I wrote about going to see the movie Julie & Julia, which was based on today's book, but today I decided it was time that I actually read the book for the blog. Plus, I'm working on turning my blogging experience into a book and it never hurts to check out the blog-to-book competition. After reading today's book, I've come to three conclusions:
- The movie was better. The book wasn't bad, and there were parts that I really enjoyed, but there were a lot of parts of the book that had practically nothing to do with the blogging experience. Which pretty much makes me the biggest hypocrite ever since 90% of my blog is comprised of forcing you to listen to childhood stories, posting childhood pictures that barely have anything to do with the days book, and generally rambling about me while I completely ignore the book that I'm supposed to be writing about.
- I have no idea how you've done it all these months dear readers, because I just don't have the patience to wade through all the extraneous details of some one's life while trying to get to the actual point of the project. I have no idea what that says about me that I don't like to read the kind of stuff that I write, but I fear it can't be good. So thank you dear readers, for overlooking my obsessive need to talk about myself, my family, my childhood, and the hundred other things I talk about that have nothing to do with the book at hand.
- My blogging project has included multiple illnesses, holiday, and a vacation, but I have yet to include the biggest blogging challenge of all, working on the blog while moving. Oh well, I guess I should have planned ahead better so that I could have heightened the sense of drama. Although, I don't feel like the book included that many details on how the move impacted the blogging project, so I was a little confused as to why it was included.
Favorite sentence: Julie is describing her childhood after school habits, "On those afternoons I would grab my stack of Oreos - I had a firm (well, pretty firm) rule never to eat more than ten in the afternoon . . . " - Clearly she isn't related to a brother that has such a shaky grasp of the concept of cookie moderation that his parents had to make a 3 cookie rule in order to keep him from putting himself into a diabetic coma. . . and then of course, a Mother who is so stuck in the idea of everything being fair at all times that the 3 cookie rule ends up getting extended even to those children in the family who can control their cookie intake. But hey, I'm not bitter about it.
Favorite passage, "Most of the stupidest things I have ever done I've done in the fall. I call it my First-Day-of-School syndrome, a bone-deep hangover from a time when autumn meant something. When I was eleven, the syndrome revealed itself in the tragically self-defining sartorial decision to match a pair of purple zip-up go-go boots with a Miss Piggy sweater." - I really wish that I was unable to relate to that passage, but sadly I have too many Back-to-School pictures involving neon hair scrunchies, bad perms, white Keds with socks that perfectly match my Guess t-shirt which I was wearing with a jean skirt (it almost makes me gag just to write the words "jean skirt"), and then there was the "Rachel Green" haircut incident in which I ended up with about 30 layers more than Rachel had and ended up going to school looking like a boy from the 70s.
And so, in conclusion dear readers, I would recommend skipping today's book and just watching the movie instead (which is a sentence I rarely ever say - but I feel like if my Dad actually read my blog, he would be really proud of.)
