Of course I read Coetzee. Nobody could make you feel as cultured and literary in the space of some 200-odd pages as the stoic and writerly looking man from Cape Town. I read the second of his two Booker Prize–winning novels, Disgrace, when it came out in 1999, at a time when I was experimenting heavily with ketamine, and then went to the back catalog, the novels of the apartheid era, including Waiting for the Barbarians and the other Booker winner, 1983’s Life & Times of Michael K. In 2003, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature—the second South African writer to do so.