This little copy of Foe by J.M. Coetzee is – mercifully – the shortest book I’ve been assigned this semester. It’s so small, I almost lost it! Isn’t that cute! It’s hiding from me!

It’s also small enough for me to have read it straight through in one night during this past week of sickness and erratic sleeping patterns. At some point, I drew a highly lucid diagram, which was intended to summarize the plot, on the back of the book receipt. I just looked at it again today, and it’s pretty much a series of concentric circles (but three-dimensional!), with the middle circle representing Crusoe’s island. You know, because that’s the one constant in this story.

Clearly, I was not in a state to be reading something so surreal.