Wednesday Book Recommendation: Beach Read #2

As I admitted in my post-vacation post, my stack of beach reads remained untouched while we were at the coast. We were too busy doing fun things like exploring the U.S.S. Yorktown and playing putt-putt with our nephews! :-)

However, after leaving the South Carolina coast on Thursday afternoon and making a quick stop at home in Tennessee, we drove north on Friday morning to Michigan for a friend's wedding. On the long ride home on Sunday, I decided to pull out My Life in France by Julia Child to see how long I could read before getting carsick. The book must have been good because I got about a 1/3 of the way through it before feeling queasy. I've continued to read it in between unpacking and laundry and catching up on emails and have found it to be thoroughly enjoyable and funny.

Julia Child had such a zest for life and for French cooking and she reveled in the cultures and experiences that one has when living outside ones home country. She shares her frustrations with certain aspects of life outside of the U.S. (like fridged apartments in winter - reminicent of Lesotho), but she also expresses surprise after running into Americans who can't stand anything about France or it's people and can only talk about getting back to America.

I found myself surprisingly sympathetic with Julia in most of her sentements and experiences (despite the fact that she stood to the left of the political line and I am staunchly conservative). More often than not I was laughing along with the book because it brought back memories of our times in Africa and Indonesia and I discovered that I was "homesick" for our world traveling days. I miss the varity of cultures and foods, the new people and places, the amazing experiences and even some of the frustrations of travel and life outside of the United States. I will never understand her love affair with cooking (I couldn't care less about finding the perfect mayonaise recipe or veal stock!), but in many other areas of her life, including her relationship with her husband Paul, I found myself saying, "Me too Julia, me too."  

Bottom line, you don't have to know anything about cooking (or even enjoy it) to like My Life in France. Overall I would give it four stars (out of five) for the story and writing. I loved Julia's enjoyment of life, her constant desire to learn (about food, people, politics and more), and even her passion for butter and sauces. :-) 

Amazon links are part of the Amazon Associates program, but the opinions are totally my own.