The Running Bibliophile

The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2) by Robert Galbraith, a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling, is the second book in the Cormoran Strike book series. Comoran Strike is contacted by Mrs. Quine when her novelist husband has been missing for several days without contacting her, and she wants him found and brought home. As Strike investigates, he's finding that their might be more to his disappearance than meets the eye due to his newest unpublished novel ripping apart the people in his life. When Strike finds Mrs. Quine's husband brutally murdered, he knows he has little time to determine who the killer is. It took me a bit to get into the second installment of the Cormoran Strike book series, but once I got a bit into The Silkworm , it moved along quite well but could've been a bit shorter. I ended up really enjoying it despite the length, and I thought it was written better than the first book in as that it wasn't quite as predictable as The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Stri...

The Cuckoo's Calling (Comoran Strike, #1) by Robert Galbraith opens with Comoran Strike working as a private investigator in London, England. When John Bristow hires Comoran Strike to investigate the death of his sister Lula Landry, a famous supermodel, Strike is thrown into the world of celebrities as he investigates the case. I read this book for one of the book clubs I was in, and had I not been in the book club, I'm not sure if I would have picked up this novel or not. When it was released it became public knowledge relatively quick that Robert Galbraith was actually J.K. Rowling writing under a pseudonym. It didn't really surprise me that she used one as I'm sure she wanted the book to be reviewed more honestly and not compared to her Harry Potter book series for children. While I did enjoy The Cuckoo's Calling immensely, it did follow the typical formula for books in the mystery and thriller categories. I expected a lot more from J.K. Rowling, so I didn...

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2) by J.K. Rowling opens with Harry Potter stuck at the Dursleys’ house for the summer, where he is once again treated terribly and made to feel unwanted. Things take a strange turn when Harry receives an unexpected visitor: Dobby, a house-elf who dramatically warns him not to return to Hogwarts because terrible things will happen if he does. Of course, Harry ignores the warning and heads back to school, where everything quickly begins to unravel. Mishap after mishap follows, and before long students at Hogwarts start mysteriously being turned to stone, sending fear and suspicion through the school. Although Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was published in 1998, just after my nineteenth birthday, I don’t remember hearing much about it, or even the first book Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, at the time. I vaguely recall kids and teens talking about how good the books were, but that was about it.  It wasn’t unt...

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, #1) by J.K. Rowling was published on June 26, 1997, two days before my birthday. However, with it being a children's book, I didn't hear much buzz about it until it was made into a movie a few years later. As additional books and movies were released, I continued to hear even more chatter from adults about the series and how they loved it. When I finally joined my first two book clubs in 2010, they were absolutely flabbergasted that I hadn't read any of the Harry Potter books. At this point, it was more that I was being stubborn about it and didn't want to jump on the bandwagon. In fact, I jumped on the Twilight bandwagon before reading this series. It wasn't until 2011 before I eventually broke down to read this series, and I read them all one after the other without really reading much else. By the end of the series, I was burnt out on it. When I first picked up the Harry Potter series, I didn'...