Julie and Julia by Julie Powell

Book Description
With the humor of Bridget Jones and the vitality of Augusten Burroughs, Julie Powell recounts how she conquered every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and saved her soul. Julie Powell is 30-years-old, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a soul-sucking secretarial job that's going nowhere. She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged assignment. She will take her mother's dog-eared copy of Julia Child's 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she will cook all 524 recipes. In the span of one year.
At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the simple Potage Parmentier (potato soup) into the more complicated realm of aspics and crépes, she realizes there's more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the eye. With Julia's stern warble always in her ear, Julie haunts the local butcher, buying kidneys and sweetbreads. She sends her husband on late-night runs for yet more butter and rarely serves dinner before midnight. She discovers how to mold the perfect Orange Bavarian, the trick to extracting marrow from bone, and the intense pleasure of eating liver.
And somewhere along the line she realizes she has turned her kitchen into a miracle of creation and cuisine. She has eclipsed her life's ordinariness through spectacular humor, hysteria, and perseverance. Published in 2005, 320 pages.
Description from book jacket

Research the author and the book using library resources
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Discussion questions
Julie and Julia discussion questions from readingroupguides.com

Additional information
“The Julie/Julia Project: Nobody Here But Us Servantless American Cooks” Read the blog post that started it all in 2002.
Read Julie Powell’s current blog “What Could Happen?”
“INK Q&A: Julie Powell” at interview at Powells.com.
“Culinary Journey: Julie And Julia” CBS Evening News, NEW YORK, June 11, 2003.
“US cook wins blogging book prize" An American cook's adventures in the kitchen have won the first literary prize for bloggers turned authors. BBC NEWS, 04/03/2006.
Watch this VidLit, a hilarious animated 3 minute video excerpt from the book.

Readalikes
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Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford
Hidden Kitchens: Stories, Recipes, and More from NPR's The Kitchen Sisters by Nikki Silva