It has been a while since I gave you an update on how my reading challenge has been going. I’m still not flying through books the way I used to and I have begun and rejected at least one book lately but on the whole, things are improving.

Having finished – and thoroughly enjoyed – Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant, I went straight out and ordered another Anne Tyler book, A Spool of Blue Thread. I’m very lucky that our local independant bookshop will order books for me in English and they are generally available for collection the following day. I rarely order a book online these days since it is so nice to pop into the shop, have a chat, order my books and collect them at my own leisure. No missing the postman or dealing with online returns. It is a joy!

But back to the actual books. Rather than go straight from one Anne Tyler to another, I decided to try out an Anita Brookner book someone had left behind after a stay in our guest room. ‘Bay Of Angels’ is the first of Anita Brookner’s books I have read and I am undecided on it.

Initially I liked it. It is intelligent and needs a certain amount of concentration. The story is slow-moving, but not boring. Switching between Nice and London, the main character has her life turned upside down a couple of times. The subject of the book is how she deals with these changes.

Somewhere around halfway through, the book seemed to be getting repetitive. Then a lovely parcel arrived from Penguin Books with, among others, the 2015 winner of the Irish Book Award for Popular Fiction. Sitting down during nap time to read the back cover, I was taken in and began reading.

I can see why Sinead Moriarty won the popular fiction award with her novel The Way We Were. It is an easy read, a page turner and quite enjoyable. I finished it within a couple of days, taking a break from ‘Bay of Angels’. It is the kind of book where you find yourself, days after having finished it, wonder what the characters are up to, as if they are real people you know.

I couldn’t resist moving straight from Sinead Moriarty to Anne Tyler’s ‘A Spool of Blue Thread’, which tells the story of the Whitshank family over three generations. Tyler’s storytelling is wonderful, immersing the reader in the situations. I found myself with vivid pictures in my imagination of the houses, the people and the scenarios in the story.

So it will come as no surprise that I will be moving on to another of Tyler’s works ‘The Accidental Tourist’ soon. As soon as I finish ‘Bay of Angels’.