Is there a book written in present tense that you like? The one I'm reading now -- award-winning -- is really getting under my skin. Partly because (I think) of the tense and partly because of such glimmer trains as, "She also spies a teddy bear that your dad brought back from Colombo along with a sexually transmitted disease, which was his parting gift to your Amma. The disease was called despair."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatures_of_Light_and_Darkness
Present tense there basically turns it into poetry.
@johns So far I haven't (for certain) retrieved a title from the old Mind Palace, but a twin thought: I *feel* like I have read one that was present-tense and first-person ... and ... I notice that your example sentence is third-person. So, out of curiosity, does the thirdpersonism add significantly to the irritation? Based on the example I suspect it would for me....