Remove broken link

Author: devalog

_posts/2022-09-21-beautifulworld.md

@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ title: "A beautiful book, you were not"
 date: 2022-09-21
 ---
 
-I'm a little bit embarrassed about how much I like *Conversations with Friends* and *[Normal People](normal_people_review.html)*, the first two books by author Sally Rooney. I think this embarrassment comes from a variety of places. Sally Rooney is a [super popular](https://www.gq.com/story/sally-rooney-bucket-hat) author, and I sort of resent that I really like an author who a lot of other people like. I want to have more alternative, subtle taste in books! Her books are also pretty melodramatic. They're all on-and-off relationships and lack of communication and existential crises. I like this angst, but I'm also a little ashamed that I like this angst – it feels like something I should have grown out of. Anyway, because I liked Sally Rooney's first two books so much, I was really excited to hear she had a new book coming out – *Beautiful World, Where Are You*. I was so excited in fact, that I preordered the damn book back in June. (It came out in September.) I've never preordered a book in my life.
+I'm a little bit embarrassed about how much I like *Conversations with Friends* and *Normal People*, the first two books by author Sally Rooney. I think this embarrassment comes from a variety of places. Sally Rooney is a [super popular](https://www.gq.com/story/sally-rooney-bucket-hat) author, and I sort of resent that I really like an author who a lot of other people like. I want to have more alternative, subtle taste in books! Her books are also pretty melodramatic. They're all on-and-off relationships and lack of communication and existential crises. I like this angst, but I'm also a little ashamed that I like this angst – it feels like something I should have grown out of. Anyway, because I liked Sally Rooney's first two books so much, I was really excited to hear she had a new book coming out – *Beautiful World, Where Are You*. I was so excited in fact, that I preordered the damn book back in June. (It came out in September.) I've never preordered a book in my life.
 
 I read an [excerpt of the book](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/12/unread-messages) a few months before it came out and was totally intrigued. I also read a ton of reviews in the months in between when I preordered the book and when I received it in the mail. Many reviewers commented on how the omniscient third person narration chapters are interspersed with first person narration chapters that consisted of "emails" between two characters. [The Sewanee Review, for example, called the book "the most ambitious and least successful of Rooney's novels"](https://thesewaneereview.com/articles/beautiful-world-where-are-you) because of this technique, but like other reviews, stopped short of absolutely condemning the technique. I absolutely condemn the technique – the rest of this article is my polemic on why I hated this artistic choice.