“I never read a book before reviewing it – it prejudices a man so.” So said the Anglican clergyman, wit and author Sydney Smith, whose own books I must confess I have never read myself.
It is in this same spirit that I notice Ireland’s most celebrated (by the Leftish media and literary establishment, anyway) novelist Sally Rooney has a new book out. Called Intermezzo, it apparently concerns the fascinatingly erudite inner lives and relationships of a group of impeccably Left-leaning Irish millennials who have probably not long left Trinity College, Dublin, and sit around all day being terribly concerned about women’s rights, the climate crisis, mental health issues and the alleged ills of late capitalism, because that’s what all of her books are about, ever: telling them apart is as futile a task as trying to remember which Hercule Poirot mystery is which, but at least those particular books have the virtue of seeing some of their main protagonists get horribly murdered, which does not appear to happen in any of Ms. Rooney’s works, sadly.
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