I'm often irritated by narrative written in the present tense. The tense doesn't immediately turn me off a novel, though: I really enjoyed Michael Frayn's Headlong : A Novel, with the immediacy of the protagonist's plunge into obsession captured by the tense. And now that I'm again re-reading Tunnel Vision, I realise that it, too, uses the present tense for most of the frantic narrative (the thing that irritates me about this book -- you know there has to be something -- is that it's set in a sans serif type).
Tunnel Vision tells the story of a tubespotter (think trainspotter, but with an obsessions focussed on the glorious London Underground) who bets his wedding and honeymoon that he can journey all 260-odd stops on the Tube in one day. With a drunken tramp as his Virgil and the dodgy signals of the Tube as his nemesis, our hero desperately tries to beat the clock in order to meet his fiancée at the Eurostar.