You know you haven't updated your blog in a while when you have to go back and check what you wrote in your last post. But hey, apparently I was talking about The Paying Guests, which means I can now say that it was brilliant. It's a bit of a tome, but it never felt long - I was carried halfway through it on a wave of thinking that something was about to happen, and then scoffed the rest of it in one sitting because something did indeed happen, and I was desperate to find out the end. My best friend wasn't sure about the ending, but I loved it. I can't really say more than that because I don't want to spoil it, but I HIGHLY recommend you read it for yourself.
Since then I've been wandering round in a bit of a reading daze. I tried to start I Saw A Man by Owen Sheers, which I was really looking forward to, but it's a bit of a slow burner compared to The Paying Guests so I didn't get too far into it before my attention wandered. I spent a while not really reading anything, then listened to an audiobook instead - Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey, narrated by Anna Bentinck. This was a recommendation from my aforementioned best friend a while ago, and I wasn't disappointed. It's very clever, narrated in the first person by a woman with dementia, so you can't work out if the mystery she is trying to solve is really a mystery at all, and Emma Healey does an absolutely brilliant job of showing how her dementia progresses through the way the narrative threads get increasingly muddled, as well as through the events in the story. I was also really impressed with the narration in the audiobook - Anna Bentinck uses her voice wonderfully subtly to show the changes from one narrative thread to another.
Since finishing that, I've read another Faye Kellerman to try to get my reading mojo back on track, and been disappointed that there is a gap in the series on Kindle now, so I might have to see whether the library can plug it. I've also started Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project, which is interesting. And this weekend I started Alice Bliss by Laura Harrington, because I fancied something else and I had it on my shelf, and I'm really getting into it. I'm also enjoying reading a "proper book" again - almost everything else I've read this year has been on Kindle. I'm enjoying it so much that I'm not entirely sure how I managed to contain myself in Waterstones the other day. I think it was only because I was with my lovely boyfriend (he was buying a board game) and I'm still kidding myself that he doesn't yet know the full extent of my book habit. I say kidding myself, because he asked me for my Waterstones points card, which he just assumed I had (and of course he was right), and then wasn't surprised when I also produced my "spend ten pounds and we stamp it" loyalty card thing. I think the cat is probably out of the bag. Which is good, because I'm going to be spending my summer holiday within walking distance of a large and very lovely branch of Waterstones, and... well, you can guess what's going to happen next.
