Disgrace

I just did something lovely. I finished a novel that I was reading for pleasure, one that had nothing to do with any projects I'm working on. I finished J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and now I am a huge Coetzee fan -- definitely in my top ten favorite writers of all time. And, I should say, it's tough to make it onto my top ten list if you're not a Jewish writer, but Coetzee joins two other lucky non-Jews on my list: Jose Saramago and Toni Morrison. I really did not try to include Nobel prize-winners, but I guess they won for a reason . . .

I mentioned this to my dissertation advisor yesterday when we were having lunch, and he told me that Coetzee was once his teacher at Buffalo, but that he had left the university "in disgrace." If you aren't familiar with the novel Disgrace it's about that very subject. Such strange little connections I'm always discovering . . . all over the place . . . in the likeliest, and unlikeliest, of places.

On my list to read this week:

Allegra Goodman's Intuition
Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go