Cooking Up a Shared Experience
Published: March 5, 2010
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Julie Powell, author of “Julie and Julia: A Year of Cooking Dangerously,” will be visiting NEPA next month.
There are very few shared experiences anymore. But that isn’t stopping the Lackawanna County Library System from trying to create one.
Lackawanna County librarians have announced the 2010 edition of the annnual countywide reading program called “On the Same Page in Lackawanna County.” The program joings hundreds of community reading programs organized by libraries around the country, in which residents read the same book and then get together to discuss it.
“Getting lots of people to talk about the same book is a great thing for a community,” said Mary Garm, library system administrator. “This is year three of our countywide book club and every year it gets bigger and better.”
And tastier, because this year’s shared book is “Julie and Julia: A Year of Cooking Dangerously” by Julie Powell. The book recounts Powell’s ambition to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s classic, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in a single year and write about the experience in a blog.
The blog evolved into the book and the book, published in 2005, became a national best-seller. Then, last year the book became a major motion picture, “Julie and Julia,” starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. The film did well at the box office, was popular with critics and has so far garnered Streep a Golden Globe Award and Film Critics Circle Awards in New York and London.
The program works like this: stop in to the Valley Community Library, 739 River St., Peckville, or the Carbondale Public Library, 5 N. Main St., Carbondale (or any other library in the Lackawanna County system) and pick up a copy of the book. That will entitle you to attend a meet-and-greet reception with Powell when she speaks at the Scranton Cultural Center on Tuesday, April 13.
You’ll have a chance to discuss the book with your neighbors, too. There’s a book club-style discussion at the Valley Community Library on Wednesday, March 31, at 7 p.m. and at the Carbondale Public Library on Wednesday, April 7, at 6 p.m. Book discussions will be led by Jean Marie Lynn, a librarian at the Taylor Community Library.
A native of Austin, Texas, Powell is a graduate of Amherst College where she majored in theater and fiction writing. After college she relocated to New York City with dreams of an acting career. Instead she spent the next seven years in temp jobs. To escape the monotony of her life, she embarked on what she called her “Julie/Julia Project”. Recently she published her second book, “Cleaving: a Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession.” She resides in Long Island City, Queens, with her husband Eric, two cats, a snake and a 110-pound dog named Robert.
