Book Club: Julie and Julia, Part One

The First 100 Pages and the Inevitable Boeuf Bourguignon.

I spent a blissful Sunday making Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourguignon, inspired by Julie Powell.

What is a blogging voice vs. a literary voice? This is the question that screamed out at me as I started reading the first hundred pages of Julie and Julia for the first installment of The Amateur Gourmet Book Club, as selected by this month’s co-host, Jenny Rosenstrach.

Obviously this question is important to me: when I decided to make the leap from food blogger to novelist my biggest insecurity was that my writing style would be “too bloggy.” And, indeed, when I looked up the original New York Times review of Julie’s book, David Kamp wrote: “Julie and Julia still has too much blog in its DNA: it has a messy, whatever's-on-my-mind incontinence to it, taking us places we'd rather not go….”