Sally Rooney — Conversations With Friends
Note: Scribbled notes are just things I jot down while reading a book. They may not always make the best summaries or synopses, but will give you a good sense of my thoughts on the book.
Why hasn't everyone who reads read this book?
I’ve often imagined a lavender-and-cinnamon scented future apartment with white walls and a Sansevieria in a white vase by a corner, black floor-to-ceiling windows keeping out a six pm shower. I really love this book; it feels like the sort of book I’d really like reading in my future apartment after placing the groceries on the white-tiled kitchen floor, and settling in a reading nook with a navy blue cushion paid for by Monday’s royalties from my first book of essays. When I’m no longer the sort of person that googles premier league fixtures idly on a Monday afternoon. You can’t actively stop being that person, you just have to grow into the sort of person who doesn’t do that. I also imagine buses sometimes. I imagine sitting on a bus-seat in the evening. I don’t know where the bus is going, but I imagine it’s to my future apartment.
This is a fantastic book. So much prose feels like you're snapping your fingers under water. Not this. It's probably at least a little because of nostalgia, oh to be twenty-one. Oh to feel so intensely; even if it’s about not feeling enough. I suspect this because the relationship I feel for most is the one between Bobbi and Frances, our protagonist: oh young love.
I feel like it’s best to go into books ‘cold’. Like I feel if I told you anything at all about the characters or the story I’d be telling you something you shouldn’t know. I feel like it’s best to leave you with general tags and have you use that information to decide if you want to read the book, so that’s what I’m going to do.
Author: born in 1991. Millenial. Irish. Female.
Themes: Relationships, Coming-of-age, Contemporary life.
Sittings to read: Three; of half an hour, a couple of hours, and a little less than a couple of hours each.
Pacing: Brisk, breezy.