A book review, I guess

I'm actually reading two food books right now. The one I wrote about the other day and one called Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. In order to stave off her biological clock and an impending nervous breakdown, Julie Powell (this is a true story, by the way) decided to cook every recipe - that's 524 - in Julia Child's seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Hilarity, obscenities, offal and 10 pounds of butter induced weight gain ensue.

Anyway, it's been a really enjoyable book, and I'm sorry that I'm down to the last few pages. Although now I can comfort myself with her newest memoir, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession. French cooking mastered, she goes on to try her hand at butchery.

So, as I said, an enjoyable read. It's not rocket science, or food science for that matter, just a little peek into a year in someone's life when they decide to do something a little crazy. But then there's this thought, and it takes the whole thing to a new level (for me at least):

I knew this because for nearly eleven months Julia had resided in my brain, in those drafty, capacious, hopeful apartments where the ghost of Santa Claus still placidly rattled about, along with my watchfully dead grandmother, and reincarnation and magic and everything else that couldn't survive out in the brighter hard highways of my mean metropolitan mind.

So lovely and real and universal. I'm sure we all have these places in us. Harry Potter, my alternate existence as a hippie in a yurt, the idea of soul mates and karma happily wander around in mine.