Book Read
7. Conversations With Friends – Sally Rooney
Kilometres Ran
week seven – 38.4
2019 to Date: 291 KM
I’m reminded of when Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? started getting armchair reviews from casual readers who hated it because they expected it to be a self-help book and they learned nothing about how to behave. That has nothing to do, per se, with Sally Rooney except to ask, is Rooney the Irish Heti? I find their style very similar, not to mention their telling of contemporary life. Rooney was born in Ireland and lives in Dublin, the primary setting of the book, which follows the narrator Frances and her self-absorbed friend Bobbi. Much like Heti’s breakout book, Rooney’s Conversations With Friends is a rather polarizing novel, with many people hating the pace, events, and characters. And while I too find some of the characters grating – I loathe Bobbi, for instance – I am on the love-it side of the continuum for this novel, and I’m looking forward to reading Rooney’s new novel Normal People after it is released in Canada in April.
After racing the First Half Marathon last weekend, this week was pretty relaxed. Not because I wanted it to be but rather because I’m trying to do as I’m told, which is just as difficult as it sounds. After over three weeks straight of running every day, this week I was relegated to three short and one long run. It feels like a set back but I have to trust that I’m in good hands and I realize that all of this sounds rather vague because it is, because that’s all I want to put down about it for now. It’s now eleven weeks until the BMO Marathon and while I’ve been filling my non-running days (and some of my running days, too) with riding my bicycle, it feels like I should be running a lot more than four times, for under 40 KM in a week. Trust has never really been my forté.