Julie Powell's effort to cook her way through the massively intimidating Mastering the Art of French Cooking is hugely entertaining, even if (due to vegetarianism) I wouldn't want to touch a lot of what she cooks with a barge-pole. A lot of what makes this very informal memoir funny is that Powell is by no stretch of the imagination the greatest cook in the world. She's not even close. Not incompetent, but picky eating habits as a kid have left great gaps in her culinary capability - she's never cooked an egg, for instance. Perhaps that says something terrible about me as a reader, finding humour in someone else's ineptitude, but really. I can't ever picture myself trying to extract marrow from an uncut bone, but I'm pretty sure I'd be floundering too and that's reassuring in its mild spitefulness, so I'm laughing with a clear conscience. And credit where it's due, Powell set herself a ridiculous task, albeit as an escape from a very ordinary life, and she managed it - and as much as I enjoyed giggling at the frustrations caused her by one of the world's most famous cookbooks, I was equally happy to see her succeed.