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Last night, I happened upon Julie and Julia on HBO. Although I have seen the film several times, I couldn’t help watching it again.  It’s a fun, but limited portrayal of Julia Child’s early years in France.  The sadly departed Nora Ephron based her screenplay on two memoirs — Julie and Julia by Julie Powell and My Life in France by Julia Child.

Skip Julie Powell’s memoir (I found it insipid) but if; 1) you adore food and travel, 2) own at least a few cookbooks (maybe one of which is Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking), or 3) need to escape your own, perhaps routine, life for a more exciting one in post WWII France — then get your winter-weary self to your local bookstore or library and get a copy* of My Life In France.  You’ll thank me later.

Julia kept notes and letters, and in the last years of her life, she began to shape this book with her grandnephew Alex Prud’homme.  The result is a brilliant journey with Julia Child — to read this book is to be right with her in France —  tasting the food, smelling the baking bread, walking on the French cobblestones and embracing it all with Julia’s delight and gusto. This is an engaging story of Julia’s early isolation in a foreign country that at once confused but enthralled her, and she faces these challenges with  self-deprecation and charming self-confidence.

There is, of course, an abundance of French food. But there is also hard work  — from her struggles with learning French to outright chauvinism at the male-dominated Corden Bleu cooking school where Julia finally gains admittance.  You get a wonderful glimpse into the private lives of Julia and Paul and their remarkable marriage.  She tells of “making do” in post war France, of having to initially cook on a hot plate (this will not do!), spotty electrical service and need to shop at individual markets for each meal’s provisions.  There is a sober side to her memoir as she and Paul deal with an erroneous McCarthy investigation as a result of his OSS work.

Her struggles during the creation of her infamous two volume cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking (which shot to the best seller lists after the release of the Julie and Julia film) are fascinating as Julia painstakingly tests, re-tests and then tests again countless recipes.  The perfectionism in the development of her mayonnaise recipe caused me to crack open my copy of the cookbook just to read the recipe. (I have plans to attempt it one of these days.)  The differences between flour in France versus America causes great concern for an worthy cross-Atlantic baguette recipe.  She tells of the early troubles with the massive two-volume Mastering the Art of French Cooking — from the many titles considered to publisher rejects and her co-authors dramas.

Julia Child embraced all these experiences – good and bad – as part of a remarkable journey and she clearly loved everyone who accompanied her along the way.  This is not just a book about food, this is a book brimming with life — full of passion, wisdom and creation.  One can learn a lot from such a well lived life.  I hang on to my own copy of My Life In France for gloomy times and a quick dip into its chapters restores my faith in life as an exciting adventure.

I was in need of a book that would give me an escape and make me laugh. That’s when I’m grateful for Bill Bryson.
Neither Here nor There is a book I keep to re-read in just such circumstances and when I opened it again the other day — it did the trick — I immediately started to giggle.

From the back cover:

Like many of his generation, Bill Bryson backpacked across Europe in the early seventies — in search of enlightenment, beer, and women. Twenty years later he decided to retrace the journey he undertook in the halcyon days of his youth. The result is Neither Here Nor There, an affectionate and riotously funny pilgrimage from the frozen wastes of Scandinavia to the chaotic tumult of Istanbul, with stops along the way in Europe’s most diverting and historic locales.

Mr. Bryson starts his mid-life crisis journey in Hammerfest, Norway (as far north as you can get in the world by public means of transport, he says) and re-traces his 1970 trip through Europe encountering language barriers, seedy train station hotels and delightful characters along the way.

I could quote this book for pages but will restrain myself to my favorites, get your hands on a copy and find your own:

The best than can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.

Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.

In the evening, I went looking for a restaurant.  This is often a problem in Germany.  For one thing, there’s a good chance that there will be three guys in lederhosen playing polka music, so you have to look carefully through the windows and question the proprietor closely to make sure that Willi and the Bavarian Boys won’t suddenly bound onto a little stage a half-past eight.  It should have been written into the armistice treaty that the Germans would be required to lay down their accordions along with their arms. 

The problem is that the pedestrian cross lights (in Paris) have been designed with the clear purpose of leaving the foreign visitor confused, humiliated, and, if all goes according to plan, dead.

She gave me one of those impassive Gallic (as in French) shrugs – the kind where the chin is dropped to belt level and the ears are pushed to the top of the head with the shoulders.  It translates roughly as ‘Life is a bucket of shit, monsieur, I quite agree, and while I am prepared to acknowledge this fact I shall offer you no sympathy because monsieur, this is your bucket of shit’. 

As you may have now surmised, Mr. Bryson is not afraid to be politically incorrect (he calls France’s population ‘Insufferably French) but he is also a devoted traveler and relishes the wonder and beauty of other cultures and lands.

One of the small marvels of my first trip to Europe was the discovery that the world could be so full of variety, that there were so many different ways of doing essentially identical things, like eating and drinking and buying movie tickets. 

I arose each morning just after dawn, during that perfect hour when the air still has a fresh, unused feel to it, and watch the city (Rome) come awake — whistling shopkeepers sweeping up, pulling down awnings, pushing up shutters.

The Thomas Cook European Timetable  is possibly the finest book ever produced.  It is impossible to leaf through its five hundred pages of densely printed timetables without wanting to dump a double armload of clothes into an old Gladstone and just take off.  Every page whispers romance:  Montreux-Zweisimmen-Spiez-Interlacken or perhaps Beograd-Trieste-Venezia-Verona-Milano.  Who could recite these names without experiencing a tug of excitement?  Who could glance at such an itinerary and not want to climb aboard?  (Sadly, this guide is no longer published or even on-line – they went out of business in 2013.)

This re-read made my travelers feet itchy.  Mr. Byrson travels with open eyes, a sense of adventure, child-like wonder and a marvelous sense of humor.  A required skill set for every traveler.

N.B.  Neither Here nor There is also educational, you’ll learn important facts about each country.  For example, did you know that Liechtenstein is the world’s largest producer of sausage skins and dentures?

N.B.2 Stay tuned, we’re planning a trip to Switzerland  …hmm perhaps this itinerary — Montreux-Zweisimmen-Spiez-Interlacken

Lets be clear, this is not a memoir specifically about J. D. Salinger, nor another sordid tale of having had an affair with him (thank goodness)–this is a memoir of a young woman working at his literary agency in the mid 1990’s.

Alright I can hear your yawns from here, but I’m always interested in the inner workings of the publishing industry and so I decided to read this memoir by Joanna Rakoff.

It’s the mid 1990’s and Joanna is 23 years old, and much like in The Devil Wears Prada, she really has no experience or interest in publishing but is thrilled to land an “assistant” position at a literary agency – referred to as “The Agency”.  This is one of those classy but underpaid positions that presumably one can brag about at dinner parties.  Ms. Rakoff has never read anything by Salinger and she thinks when agency staff refer to “Jerry”, their star client, they mean Jerry Seinfield.  In fact “Jerry” is their code name for J. D.  (Jerome David) Salinger, the notoriously reclusive author.

This is an old-school literary agency.  Here is a world of richly carpeted offices, no overhead florescent lighting — just shaded lamps, messengers, martini lunches and book-shelved lined hallways.  Computers are only whispered about by the staff.

Joanna is given strict orders to never give out any information on Salinger and the agency must protect his privacy at all costs.  Joanna’s main job is to answer Salinger’s many fan letters with a simple but curt form letter:

“Dear ___________
Many thanks for your recent letter to J.D. Salinger. As you may know, Mr. Salinger does not wish to receive mail from his readers. Thus, we cannot pass your kind note on to him. We thank you for you interest in Mr. Salinger’s books.

Best,  The Agency”

Her boss insists that Joanna type these letters out individually on a Selectric typewriter (using carbon paper) in order to give the fans a sense that an actual agency person has written back to them.  Joanna must also answer her boss’s phone and if “Jerry”calls she is to keep it short and take a detailed message.

Joanna’s personal life is a mess, she lives with a ghastly boyfriend in a run-down apartment with no heat or a kitchen sink (?).  She has, for no explanation, left the guy she really loves and he fled to California.  Her parents have presented her with all her college bills unexpectedly unpaid and used her credit cards to rack up debt that Joanna must some how pay down.  She’s broke financially and in her heart, so the agency is her only solace as Joanna is a lover of books, an avid reader and an aspiring poet.

There’s this lovely quote

 On authors: The strange wonder of powerful writing, engaged in like some act of reflective devotion, and then, sent out, as on the wind, to find some home with unknown readers who in turn receive this revelation and transformation. Literature not as `escape’, literature as engagement.

It’s fun when Joanna steers away from the standard form letter and tries writing personal letters to the Salinger fans – with disastrous results.  She hopes to become an agent and dips into the agency slush pile, finds an unknown author and tries to get her published.  Also in the end, Joanna actually meets Salinger when he make a rare appearance at the agency offices.

That, my friends is about all that was interesting about this memoir. I’ve just saved you the chore of reading it yourselves.   I did find some interesting parts about the inner workings of a literary agency – especially the care and feeding of Salinger himself.    The grand event of finally getting one office computer for everyone to share was amusing and there’s some sly literary name dropping.   This memoir covers a entire year of Ms. Rakoff’s life and it felt equally long to make it through this slow and overly-detailed story.  One of the professional reviewers mentioned that this memoir started out as a much shorter magazine story and perhaps it should have stayed in that form.

Advanced review copy provided by Alfred A. Knopf