Whenever people ask what I read I start by exclusion: I don't read books in the headlines, except long afterwards. Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee won the Booker Prize in 1999, and only now, in 2025, I read it, and find myself impatient with the plottedness, careful and incisive as it is, historical and compassionate, forcefully engaged with maleness and its needs, mindful of history, careful —and distracted — with family.
In the last week or two I have read Coetzee's three autobiographical books: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime, and dipped into his correspondence with Paul Auster. How he dealt with himself there is somehow more palatable than the fiction structure built in Disgrace around David Lurie, Communications Lecturer, twice divorced, etc, to allow him to think around himself. I couldn't take the opera that Professor Lurie was writing about Byron's latter years. Does he really need to concoct an opera around his baser instincts.
That's why I don't read Booker Prize novels. I feel forced into a bottomless query. I'd rather be out routing compost heaps.
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