The Charity Shop Reader

Species: Publishing Student.

Income: Negligible.

Habitat: Charity bookshop.

I scan the shelves; weave around rival customers in the confined space. Hungrily I take stock of today’s offerings; the shelf is sign-posted ‘All Books Only 99p’.

After careful scrutiny of the available titles, I decide on J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, a novel concerning racial and sexual tensions in South Africa. I have been the verge of reading it for years. This is what charity shops are for: they’re for the books you always wanted to read, but can’t justify buying yourself when they’re hot off the press. They are for those spontaneous choices of titles you’d never heard of before. They’re for the people who love seeing who else has already scribbled their name inside the front cover, and how many decades ago. For the people who love the faint smell of dust as much as the fresh smell of new paper and glue.

Back at home, my housemate and fellow publisher sees Disgrace lying on my bed. ‘I read that book,’ she says, ‘I don’t like it. It’s so horrible; the bit with the dogs’.

Disgrace won the 1999 Booker Prize— I’m a little behind the times, but this novel still feels current. It is a good read; a thought-provoking read. There is something unnerving about the 3rd person narration that pervades the book. But more unnerving still is that I find I am not so horrified by the episodes concerning the dogs, which are put down in vast numbers and carted off to the incinerator. I know I should be but, like the protagonist, having never seen much cruelty or neglect first-hand, I find myself distanced from it, made callous. What does sink in is that all the characters of the book are disgraced, in one form or another: by society, or by self-infliction, or in the eyes of the omniscient reader. By the close of the book, Coetzee has slowly revealed this state of disgrace in all. I feel disgraced.