The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1) by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling)

After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.

Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.

You may think you know detectives, but you've never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you've never seen them under an investigation like this.

Introducing Cormoran Strike, this is the acclaimed first crime novel by J.K. Rowling, writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

I really enjoyed this book! It was suspenseful and kept me guessing to the very end; the characters were engaging and life-like; and, for me, the story story flowed well with no boring or slow bits.

The only part where the book lost me was the very last couple of pages, I didn't get how the final poem fit in, obviously I was just missing something.

I haven't read the Casual Vacancy, but I didn't feel like I was reading a Harry Potter book at all - if I didn't know Robert Galbraith was a pseudonym I would never have known it was J.K Rowling.

Definitely worth reading if you are a fan of murder mystery stories. 

The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany one rainy afternoon in the unlikeliest of places: a city bus. "The days are long, but the years are short," she realized. "Time is passing, and I'm not focusing enough on the things that really matter." In that moment, she decided to dedicate a year to her happiness project.

In this lively and compelling account of that year, Rubin carves out her place alongside the authors of bestselling memoirs such as Julie and Julia, The Year of Living Biblically, and Eat, Pray, Love. With humor and insight, she chronicles her adventures during the twelve months she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific research, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier.

Rubin didn't have the option to uproot herself, nor did she really want to; instead she focused on improving her life as it was. Each month she tackled a new set of resolutions: give proofs of love, ask for help, find more fun, keep a gratitude notebook, forget about results. She immersed herself in principles set forth by all manner of experts, from Epicurus to Thoreau to Oprah to Martin Seligman to the Dalai Lama to see what worked for her—and what didn't.

Her conclusions are sometimes surprising—she finds that money can buy happiness, when spent wisely; that novelty and challenge are powerful sources of happiness; that "treating" yourself can make you feel worse; that venting bad feelings doesn't relieve them; that the very smallest of changes can make the biggest difference—and they range from the practical to the profound.

Written with charm and wit, The Happiness Project is illuminating yet entertaining, thought-provoking yet compulsively readable. Gretchen Rubin's passion for her subject jumps off the page, and reading just a few chapters of this book will inspire you to start your own happiness project.

I made the almost-fatal error of reading some other reviews before I started reading this book and I was a little wary going in to it, (I HATED Eat, Pray Love and have never felt the need to ready any other ‘self-help’ books before) so once I started and got hooked I was glad I didn’t let some of the really negative comments that I had read stop me.

Rubin is up-front from the beginning about her reasons as to why she felt the need to start a Happiness Project, and it’s something I can relate to – for me it I took it to be about becoming more grateful for what I have and appreciating the moment, rather than needing to overcome depression or a major trauma in my life, if this is what you are looking for then perhaps this isn’t the book for you as you might find it a little patronising or ‘self-absorbed’.

I found the idea interesting from the first page, and I liked Rubin’s approach – personally as someone who makes powerpoint presentations on upcoming holidays and detailed spreadsheets for everything, her list-making and Resolutions seemed like something I would be able to follow and easily stick to if I was ever going to initiate a Happiness Project of my own. Although I get that this isn’t going to work for everyone, so does Rubin, and she offers these as a guide to get you thinking about how you yourself would make it work for you and your own personality/situation.

It included LOTS of research and quotes throughout from various philosophers, psychologists and other authors. Some of the ideas in this book were really insightful and new, some so obvious it made me wonder why I’d never put too much thought in to it before, and others would plainly never work for me, again, its not a bible to follow but a tool to get you thinking about what makes you happy and how you can be more conscious to appreciate it in every day life when it is so easy to take for granted. I would have liked to see some reference links to some of the study results mentioned in here eg “having strong relationships lengthens your life more than stopping smoking”. 

I even learnt some new words from reading this book (eg I had no idea what a gewgaws was until now!), so you might need to keep a dictionary handy every now and then.

All in all its worth giving a go to see if this might be something that works for you – although there were no earth-shattering realisations for me after I finished reading it, it did definitely make me more aware of my communication with others and want to improve my overall attitude when daily life can sometimes make you blasé.