summer books

what i hate about lists is that i'm never able to conform to them. the only book on my summer reading list that i managed to read was "Letters to a Young Poet" by Wilke. i am, however, in the process of reading "The Master and Margarita" though so not all is lost. otherwise, i went on a tangent and read kafka on the shore by murakami
and disgrace by J.M. coetzee.

on disgrace: i didn't really enjoy the beginning of the book; it seemed that the professor/student affair was written a bit slapdash and trite, or how a lovelorn person would imagine a professor/student affair to be. i also had an issue with the orneriness of each character and found myself kind of hating them because it was so difficult to understand where they were coming from. simplistically, it might have been a way to inform the reader of the hardiness of the times and landscape, but the point was lost, to me at least, in what seemed like unmotivated stubbornness. these issues aside, i liked what Coetzee accomplished in the rest - well, most - of the book. the situations in the countryside, especially the neighbor, were strange, awful, uncomfortably foreign - but expressed the characters in a way that wouldn't have been possible off the farm.