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2024 reads, #57. DID NOT FINISH. The last time Sally Rooney had a new novel out, I used that as an excuse to finally read all three of her books for the first time right in a row, so that I could get caught up on why she’s such the big Indie Lit Brooklyn NPR It Girl these days; and while I only loved the first book but disliked the other two, I did vow that I would at least continue to read her next one as well, because I liked the first book so much that I’ve been willing to cut her a lot of slack. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t even make it all the way through that next one now that it’s finally upon us, 2024’s Intermezzo which was just released a week or two before I’m originally posting this, so my willingness to check out any of her new work in the future is now starting to drop precipitously low.

I suppose it will be satisfying to those who are looking exactly for this kind of book, but I gotta admit that it’s just not my cup of tea -- rambling, precious domestic dramas about the human condition where almost nothing of note actually happens, in which middle-class intellectuals are gently miserable mostly from their own deliberate behavior, written in an overly pretentious style full of incomplete sentences and no quotation marks around dialogue, exactly like the MFAer both she and the most fervent of her fanbase are. I got through the first ten percent, but found it so tedious that I then did my usual thing in that situation and skipped straight to the last ten percent, to see if there’s anything there so intriguing that it will convince me to change my mind and go back and read the full thing; but there wasn’t. (A little tip: If you read the first ten percent of a book and then skip straight to the last ten percent and you can still make complete, perfect sense out of what’s going on, that’s a book whose inner 80 percent is not worth your time.)

So that’s it, Rooney! I got 136 ebooks currently on my Kindle Oasis, so I don’t got time to hang in there with a book I immediately grew tedious of right from the start (ugh, so many incomplete sentences masquerading as “personal style,� right from the very first page), so it’s quickly on to Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing beginning tomorrow! Sorry, authors of the world, but that’s just the way it is!