Tag Archives: authors: jk rowling

Favorite Authors

reading habits July 22, 2015 Leave a comment

Ernest Hemingway’s birthday was yesterday, and it isn’t a secret that Hemingway is one of my favorite authors. I’ve read several books by him, but not all of them.

This got me to thinking:

Can your favorite author(s) really be your favorite author(s) if you haven’t read all his/her books?

I have read five of Hemingway’s books – A Farewell To Arms, For Whom The Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea and a compilation of all his short stories. I have a couple of his others that I haven’t gotten to yet. I didn’t even like The Old Man and the Sea. No joke, I hated it. I still consider Hemingway one of my favorites.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is another of my favorites. I haven’t read all his books either. I have read The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, and The Beautiful and Damned. I have a couple of others too that I haven’t read yet.

I’ve read two of Shirley Jackson’s books and one short story, and BOOM, she’s one of my favorites…even though I haven’t read all her stuff either.

I’ve read only part of Daphne DuMaurier’s collection. The same goes for Stephen King, Dave Barry, Agatha Christie, and Harper Lee (at least for the next few days).

The only of my favorite authors I’ve read ALL of is J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith.

So, my question stands. Can your favorite author(s) be your favorites if you haven’t read their whole collection? What if you hated part of it (like me, with Hemingway)?

I don’t have a conclusion on this one. If anyone has any thoughts, I would love to hear them.

The Silkworm

fiction October 9, 2014 1 Comment

As I mentioned in another post, I’ve been on a bit of a J.K. Rowling kick this year.

I listened to all the Harry Potter books on audiobook, and listened to The Casual Vacancy as well as The Cuckoo’s Calling. I also listened to The Silkworm. It’s the second novel she published as ‘Robert Galbraith’ and it’s the second murder mystery featuring PI Cormoran Strike.

Now, I enjoyed The Cuckoo’s Calling a lot, but was skeptical about The Silkworm, only because I was curious to see if Rowling could keep it up.

I’m just not going to doubt her anymore. There’s no point. I really, really enjoyed The Silkworm. In addition to being a solid mystery story, it was a sharp witted critique of the publishing industry.

The story surrounds the disappearance of Owen Quine, an author who wrote one critically acclaimed book a long time ago and has written mostly garbage since. He is later found dead, but Cormoran Strike is hired by Quine’s eccentric wife, Leonora, to find him and bring him back. He’s disappeared before, having affairs and being something of a douche, leaving his wife to take care of their intellectually disabled daughter, Orlando. He did love his daughter tremendously, and seemed to stay in his marriage for her sake.

Leonora becomes the prime suspect in Owen’s murder – basically because he’s a huge jerk to her, but Strike becomes convinced she didn’t do it, and keeps investigating in spite of being told to back off by the police.

We meet some other people in this book, and I think they were parodies of real people. They were over the top, awful caricatures of human beings, and so many stereotypes were employed you had to assume Rowling did it on purpose. Between Liz Tassel (the chain smoking literary agent whose career went down the toilet years ago) and Daniel Chard (the not-so-secretly-gay publisher who seemed to have a taste for barely legal men) and Michael Fancourt (the successful “literary rebel” who maintains literature should provoke social discussion but is actually using that as a cover to be a raging misogynist), they would be awful stereotypes if they weren’t so detailed.

One of Rowling’s greatest strengths – from the Harry Potter series to The Casual Vacancy to these Cormoran Strike novels – is the world she creates with details, allusions to other things. It’s all these little things that make her characters real people instead of horrendous stereotypes – little twists that make them interesting. My favorite example is Hermione Granger in the HP books. She is a bookish know-it-all, but while she is a raging nerd, she is also quite in tune with her emotions and isn’t socially inept (as many other bookish characters are described in other stories). Further, she’s doesn’t hide behind her books, she uses what she learns in them quite well – she isn’t just an academic, she’s a practical, pragmatic girl who saves her two friends over and over again. She’s just different enough to be interesting.

This is what happens in The Silkworm – details, details, details.

Anyway, the investigation is further complicated by Owen’s last manuscript called ‘Bombyx Mori,’ which appears to be a thinly veiled allegory about Owen and the other literary characters in the story.

Also in the story is Strike’s assistant, Robin, my latest favorite female character of Rowling’s, who is quite smart and a decent investigator in her own right. There is a lot of tension between them because Strike treats her like a secretary for a good portion of the book, brought on by the fact that he knows Matthew, Robin’s finace, would give her a hard time if she was doing anything else. Robin eventually is able to overcome this and join in the investigation more actively.

At this point, it’s clear that Strike is battling a growing attraction to Robin, who he thinks the world of because of her work and her brains and her guts. Strike’s former fiance is also still tormenting him from afar, marrying the old college boyfriend she originally dumped for Strike 15-20 years earlier and sending him messages, to which Strike vows not to respond.

I found the ending of this mystery particularly satisfying as well. I have a problem with mysteries – I tend to guess the end. I didn’t guess the end here, which makes me super happy.

So! J.K. Rowling has another good read out. The Silkworm is even more interesting in The Cuckoo’s Calling, I think. I’m very excited about the next Cormoran Strike story, which I hope comes out next year. Rowling says she has planned out a lot of Strike’s stories, and with the first two being very good, I think we can eagerly anticipate the rest.

Harry Potter on Audiobook

fiction October 3, 2014 1 Comment

As a child of the mid-late 1990s and early 2000s, I grew up with the Harry Potter books. I never did the midnight parties or anything like that, but the books were always pre-ordered months in advance and were delivered to my door the day of release 🙂 …I have a really good mom.

I reread the series every few years, the last time being 2011. This year, I thought I’d do it by listening to the audiobooks at work.

Everyone raved about the Jim Dale narrations of the books (the American versions). He supposedly came up with something like 70 different voices for all the characters and whatever. I got the Stephen Fry narrations (the British version) except for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I like Stephen Fry a lot, and I also didn’t suddenly realize it was him – it was mislabled as Jim Dale. Anyway, I realized the swap when I finally got to PoA.

I hated the Jim Dale narration. HATED IT. I hated it so much that I tried to find to find the Stephen Fry version of PoA to have instead. Dale won awards for his reading, but I found all his voices raspy. Hermione had a lisp – I was unaware of just how many times she said “Harry” until Dale was pronouncing it “Hawwy.” And he pronounced “VoldeMORT” as “VoldeMORE.” Now, I get that this might be the intended pronunciation/original pronunciation, but it is 7 books, 8 movies, my life from ages 11-19, and a major theme park later. Nobody uses that pronunciation. Hell, I don’t think JK Rowling even uses that pronunciation anymore.

So, yeah, I struggled to get through PoA. But I got through the summer (a particularly dull time at work and on sports radio) with these audiobooks. Stephen Fry does a good job even though he doesn’t have a billion raspy voices for all the characters. And I learned that British students don’t study, they “revise.” (For a minute, I had no idea what it was talking about.)

Overall, it was a great time investment. I always feel sad when the series is over, and this was no different.

The other thing I realized is that I wish JK Rowling would write some of the textbooks she mentions in those books. I really want to read “Hogwarts, A History” and “A History of Magic.” Yes, I know about Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them. MOAR TEXTBOOKS PLZ.

So yes, I enjoyed the Stephen Fry version of the Harry Potter books and highly recommend them. They are great!

Meme: 10 Books That Have Stuck With You

fiction, humor, memes September 16, 2014 Leave a comment

This meme is going around on Facebook, and I thought I’d share my list here.

In your status, list 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few minutes, and do not think too hard. They don’t have to be the “right” books or great works of literature, just books that have affected you in some way.

01. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
02. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
03. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
04. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
05. Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
06. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
07. Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs – Dave Barry
08. And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie
09. Rebecca – Daphne DuMaurier
10. The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson

The Casual Vacancy

fiction August 17, 2014 Leave a comment

I’m on a real JK Rowling kick this year. I’m currently in the middle of the audiobooks of the Harry Potter series, and after The Cuckoo’s Calling, I listened to The Casual Vacancy. (Her stuff is very easy to get as audiobooks).

This is the first book she published after Harry Potter and this one was under her own name. It got mixed reviews, I think, because everyone compared it to Harry Potter. It’s not Harry Potter and if you’re expecting it to be like that, you’re going to hate it.

It starts with Barry Fairbrother keeling over dead of an brain aneurysm and then really slows down for, what I’d guesstimate was, the next 100-150 pages. A ‘casual vacancy’ is the opening of a local public office seat when someone dies while in office. In this case, Barry Fairbrother. Anyway, this vacancy opens up a whole mess of issues with different people around town, from other council members to local kids.

I thought the most compelling character in the whole book was Krystal Wheedon, who was on the school rowing team coached by Fairbrother. She’s 16, very poor, and she’s taking care of her baby brother Robbie. Her mother is a useless heroin addict who prostitutes herself when she needs a fix. A lot of the tension in the book comes from parts of the council who want to push ‘The Fields’ – a low income part of town – off on another town which, these council members feel, the other town tricked them into incorporating. Krystal lives in The Fields, and Barry grew up in  The Fields. Barry wanted to keep The Fields, arguing that the kids there have bright futures. Once he dies, other people start plotting against him.

Eventually, a bunch of kids end up hacking the town council website and post a number of humiliating secrets about council members under the username “The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother” to get revenge on their parents, friends, etc… it sends a lot of the characters’ lives into disarray.

If you were looking for something even remotely close to Harry Potter, this wasn’t it. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it, but it wasn’t as awful as the worst reviews stated. The positive reviews for the most part seemed to be right on: it was a very slice of life, this could be happening anywhere type of novel. It wasn’t bad, but it was, overall, very depressing/disturbing. You didn’t really leave it feeling very good about how it wrapped up and it sort of just ends, like many events in life just end. Nothing really changes, which is true of life too, in a lot of ways.

The only good thing is one deplorable character ends up alone, which he deserves for being such a sniveling coward.

People who like those realistic novels will really enjoy The Casual Vacancy. For those of you who want a little bit more “escape from reality” in your stories, this probably isn’t the book for you.

The Cuckoo’s Calling

fiction August 16, 2014 1 Comment

The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith is the first novel I listened to on audiobook.

Everyone knows by now that Robert Galbraith is a pen name that J.K. Rowling came up with to see if anyone would read her mystery novels, and way fewer people did until they knew it was her. Having now listened to it, I don’t know how people didn’t notice before the British press spilled the beans. The writing is almost exactly the same style.

Anyway, having only listened to Billy Crystal’s memoir on audiobook, I didn’t realize that the person reading did different voices for all the different characters. I know, I know, but I’d seriously never listened to an audiobook. I thought Billy Crystal was just being a comedian impersonating guys like Mickey Mantle and whoever else. Robert Glenister read the audiobook, and I thought he did an excellent job. Now that I’ve listened to some other narrators, he’s definitely been one of my two favorites.

The Cuckoo’s Calling is a mystery, the mystery being the murder of Lula Landry, and model from a wealthy family. Cormoran Strike (weird name, right?) is hired by the deceased’s brother to investigate her death after the police classify it a suicide, which he refuses to believe she committed. He hires Comoran because his brother used to know him.

Cormoran is an interesting character – he’s an Afghanistan War veteran who left the military after he had a leg blown off by an IED. He’s just gotten out of a complicated, messy relationship, and his new private detective business isn’t going too well. He ends up with a temp office assistant named Robin, who secretly wants to be a detective herself.

Obviously I don’t want to give too much away because it’s a mystery, but what I really enjoyed about it was that the clues to who did it were in there and you could have figured it out if you were carefully looking. Because I listened to it on audiobook (at work, no less), I definitely didn’t catch them. I solve a lot of mysteries before they’re revealed, and I tend to judge how good the mystery it is by whether or not I enjoyed getting to the solution. In this case, I got to be surprised by the reveal, which was a refreshing change.

I also really enjoyed the relationship between Cormoran and Robin. In fact, I really like Robin. She’s smart, she shows initiative, and she’s good at her job. She’s the equivalent of a “His Girl Friday” character but she gets a lot more credit, which I like. Rowling gives girls/women the best supporting roles in her novels. Hermione Granger was the reason Harry Potter and Ron Weasley made it out of Hogwarts alive, and Robin Ellacott is the reason Cormoran Strike was able to gain enough information about Lula’s murder to solve it.

There was a rumor that Rowling was going to write seven Cormoran Strike novels, but she says she has plans for more, which I’m excited about, because so far I really like them.

I’m not sure there’s anything “classic” about the book, but it was enjoyable. I’d recommend it.

new Harry Potter-verse film series

fiction September 15, 2013 Leave a comment

As everyone has probably heard by now, J.K. Rowling is making her screenwriting debut based on the ‘textbook’ she wrote – Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – which originally appeared in her Harry Potter novels.

Along with Quidditch Through The Ages, Rowling originally wrote Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them to benefit the British charity Comic Relief.

As a Potterphile, I’m super excited about this. There’s so much room to play in the Harry Potter universe, and this will be fun! Some of the my favorite things about Harry Potter are the mythological creatures she uses/creatures she makes up.

Anyway, yeah, I’m super excited about it! I hope they skip the acromantulas and focus more on chimeras or something.

Book Madness – 1984 vs. Harry Potter

fiction April 9, 2013 Leave a comment

I’ve been keeping up with Out of Print Clothing’s Book Madness competition. I entered. I’ve done pretty well, but I won’t win.

I had The Hobbit beating some other story in the final four and then going on to beat Harry Potter in the final round. That didn’t happen. 1984 beat The Hobbit in the final four. I think I had 1984 out in the second round.

But I have to say…I think I seriously misjudged how much people love 1984. As I look around more and more on the web, it seems clear that this book is BELOVED. And I have to say…I don’t get it.

Don’t get me wrong. 1984 is a compelling book, very interesting, more and more relevant as time goes on, and a worthwhile read every once in awhile.

But I didn’t close 1984 and love it. Not like I loved The Hobbit or Harry Potter when I closed them. There isn’t anything particularly loveable about 1984. There isn’t. In fact, it’s one of the more hopelessly spiritually crushing books I’ve ever read.

There is no real hope at all in 1984, and the hope that Winston does have is crushed under interrogation and torture, and he’s certain in the knowledge of his own eventual death at the hand of the always watching government.

Maybe it’s just me, but I have to feel something besides utter despair at the end of a story for me to really love a book and for that book to find a warm spot in my heart. Maybe it’s because I spend a lot of time feeling enough despair in reality that I don’t want it to be all consuming in my fiction, and it’s the opposite for other people? I don’t know.

Whatever it is, I seriously underestimated the love other people have for 1984. Unfortunately because of this, I will not win a $500 shopping spree at Out of Print Clothing.