content: How do you take an idea with so much promise and turn it into an excruciating read? You allow someone like Julie Powell to write about it, that's how. Never in my entire life have I found the narrator of a book more irritating than I did Powell. More a filthy-mouthed diatribe of her whiney ways than the entertaining cookalogue it should have been, had Julia Child lived to read "Julie & Julia," undoubtedly she would have deemed it just as disrespectful and non-serious as she did Julie and her "project." I wanted to like this book; I really did. In the end, however, it's nothing more than something Powell claims to have regularly on subway platforms: a catastrophic hissy fit. One can only hope the movie fares better, but then again, it could hardly do worse. Two stars for managing to steer unlikeability and awful writing to the top of the bestseller chart. Kudos for that amazing feat at least.