We’ve only a few days to go before the arrival of the eagerly awaited fifth Cormoran Strike installment! My local independent booksellers have my copy safely in stock, ready to hand over to me on September 15, like the professionals they are (and like people who still miss the thrill of Harry Potter book release parties in the old days). In the meantime, we’re having a grand time with the tantalizing almost-10-chapter preview of Troubled Blood, which has confirmed many of our suspicions and also left us wondering what the other 63 chapters hold. From Joni Mitchell to Marilyn Manson, the range of musicians who appear to be inspiring this adventure is an impressive one, and the literary scope promises to be just as rich. If you have not kept up with Bea Groves’s beautiful insights on the Literature Game of the Strike series, catch up before Tuesday! As we’ve been hoping since the title drop, it looks like Edmund Spenser’s glorious magnum opus The Faerie Queene is a major pillar of the complex literary scaffolding we’ve come to expect from 
Rowling/Galbraith. While we wait for Tuesday, you may or may not be in the mood to read the entire six books and a bit of The Faerie Queene’s planned twelve books that Spenser was able to complete before his untimely death in 1611(C.S. Lewis reportedly said that he hoped he would discover, upon reaching heaven, that Spenser was there waiting with the remaining six books). Whether or not you are a Spenser fan, here are six and a bit hopeful possibilities for the way Spenser may be woven throughout Troubled Blood, based on what we have so far!
decade. I still use the book in my classes, mainly because I have not found anything else that works so well. In that time, movies have been made(with some of my students as extras), popularity has swelled, and my students who don’t pay attention to my constant harping on the importance of the number three in the trilogy (they are confused by four films), keep saying they want a “fourth” book. Instead of spoiling the beautiful symmetry of the original trilogy, the master Gamemaker herself brings us a prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which is both its own special sort of creature and a perfect companion to the original trilogy.
Libraries are realizing that the rural Bookmobile concept is actually pretty amazing, something I knew as a child when the magical delivery service visited my aunt’s house. It was like a traveling Scholastic Book Fair. Amazon is, of course, doing a rip-roaring business, but they aren’t delivering only books, as people are shipping everything including a kitchen sink (if Amazon doesn’t have one that suits the shut-in home-improver, I’m sure Home Depot or Lowe’s will). Local bookstores, many of which are only doing online or appointment sales, are a nice choice, and a good idea if you’d like that bookstore to be there this time next year.
. I may have complained mightily about reading any chapter in which I had to do my extravagant voices for Voldemort, Bellatrix, Dobby, and/or Snape, but I wouldn’t trade those sore throats for anything, as reading the Harry Potter books aloud to my children remains one of the most precious experiences we have shared (and I do still do the voices sometimes for laughs, although my daughter has truly made Luna her own. My grandchildren will have a ball with that one).
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