Tag Archives: JK Rowling

JK Rowling Book Cheap

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Cormoran Strike is author Robert Galbraith’s fictional character, a UK Military Police veteran now eking out a living as a private eye. He works with an assistant who some would mistakenly regard as totally out of her league in the hard boiled noir world of private detecting. (But they would be wrong.) Each of the stories about Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott is set in a different subworld of Great Britain, including London’s version of Hollywood, and the world of writers and agents. The stories are fiendishly clever, the bad guys cleverly fiendish, and the protagonists compelling and disarming. I very strongly recommend reading all of them.

Author Robert Galbraith is, of course, JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series and a few other books.

At this moment, the first of the books is on sale cheap (just under 4 bucks) in Kindle form. You should read The Cuckoo’s Calling (Cormoran Strike Book 1).

Then, not on sale at this time but for your information, read:

The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike Book 2)

Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike Book 3)

Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

Happy Anniversary Harry Potter!

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Today is the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Harry Potter phenomenon.Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was published on this day in 1997, and Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6), and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) were produced with regularity afterwards, eventually in some degree of step with the movies.

Author J. K. Rowling was to produce a number of Harry Potter related things later, but she also started a series that we hope continues about something unrelated to the world of wizardry and witchcraft, with the production of a series of books starting with The Casual Vacancy about a British detective and his very interesting assistant.

If you have not read these, read them now. If you have read the Harry Potter series, red it again now.

Can a computer replace J.K. Rowling?

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Not yet.

As you know, JK Rowling is the author of the famous Harry Potter series of books (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, etc.), and more recently, of a series of really excellent crime novels (if you’ve not read them, you need to: The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm, and Career of Evil, with a fourth book on the way, I hear).

Intuit’s Max Deutsch fed the seven Harry Potter books to a computer and told it to write a new chapter. It did. It came out as gibberish.

However, it isn’t just random gibberish. When you read the new text, you can see that the dialog for each character is styled somewhat like Rowling’s original characters. The fact that a large number of the sentences make no sense at all, and that many are agrammatical, kinda ruins the flow. It might have been a good idea to run the output from this computer through a grammar checker.

And, of course, other than the random novelty one gets when flipping coins, there is nothing new, no interesting plot elements, new characters, or novel magical tropes in this new text.

Here is an example:

“He’s cheer to their advantage,” Moody retorted suddenly.

“Sorry,” Harry shouted, panicking?—?“I’ll leave those brooms in London, are they?”

“No idea,” said Nearly Headless Nick, casting low close by Cedric, carrying the last bit of treacle Charms, from Harry’s shoulder, and to answer him the common room perched upon it, four arms held a shining knob from when the spider hadn’t felt it seemed. He reached the teams too.

“You believe if we’ve got friendly to come down and out of the library. I think I’ve found out Potter, I asked you he had . . . me. I think he’s not telling Dobby if yeh get with our Hogwarts …”

“What are you doing, Harry?” said Hermione, staring down at her. “Would Malfoy let me easier?”

“Professor Karkaroff slipped down the steps to get the second row of silver hair?”

Harry stared at the shadowy clearing, and pointing to a long, old grin. But she had been many times more like having cards, standing all around and began to sob down the steps over the brakes and Control of Magical Creatures class just pushed with gold.

I think J.K. Rowling gets to keep her job for a while longer…