Second paragraph of third chapter:

My parents had limited opportunities when they were young. Neither of them went to university. They weren’t stupid, but their frame of reference was very limited. They didn’t read particularly widely or well. Their lives were work, home, television. My dad played tennis, too, before he retired. They weren’t very well educated, and they hadn’t travelled either. Their horizons were quite narrow and neither was particularly adventurous. When I travelled, they really didn’t get it. They thought it was marvellous that I could go to Greece, but it never occurred to them that they could have gone too. The first time they ever went overseas was in 1996 or 1997, when I sent them on a holiday.

I was encouraged to get this book, then newly published, when I visited South Africa in 2017 as a guest of the Democratic Alliance. Breytenbach is a former state prosecutor who is now one of the DA’s parliamentary stars. Her autobiography is a frank account of service to the judicial system of South Africa, punctuated by politically motivated interference (a disciplinary procedure and a criminal prosecution, both of which exonerated her). The story is told in 27 beathless chapters, full of picturesque South African slang (I am still not sure if “oke” is pejorative), punctuated also by comments from friends and colleagues.

To be honest, it is not a brilliant book. It is assumed that the reader is already super-familiar with South Africa and also with the high points of its recent criminal and judicial history. Many pages are devoted to the evils of Jacob Zuma, who was then the president of the country; in fact he was forced out of office six months after this book was published, so those sections became instantly out of date. One gets the sense that Breytenbach makes few concessions in her professional life; that’s certainly also true of her approach to her readers here. For South Africanists only, I think, but you can get it here.

This was the very last book acquired in 2017 that I got around to reading, five months after I finished the last book that I acquired in 2016.

Last book acquired in 2017, read in January 2024 (Rule of Law: A Memoir)
Last book acquired in 2016, read in August 2023 (Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Lifespan)
Last book acquired in 2015, read in November 2022 (Rauf Denktaş, a Private Portrait)
Last books acquired in 2014, read in October 2021 (The Empire of Time and Crashland)
Last book acquired in 2013, read in October 2020 (Helen Waddell)
Last book acquired in 2012, read in May 2020 (A Sacred Cause: The Inter-Congolese dialogue 2000-2003)
Last book acquired in 2011, read in October 2019 (Luck and the Irish)
Last book acquired in 2010, read in January 2019 (Heartspell)
Last book acquired in 2009, read in December 2016 (Last Exit to Babylon)

The 2018 pile is not so big and I am confident that I’ll get through it in a few months too, starting with:

• The shortest book I acquired that year – The Beautifull Cassandra, by Jane Austen
• The unread sf book that has lingered longest on my shelves – Attack on Thebes, by M.D. Cooper
• The unread non-genre book that has lingered longest on my shelves – Three Plays, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart
• The unread non-fiction book that has lingered longest on my shelves – A Life in Questions, by Jeremy Paxman
• The top unread book that I acquired in 2018 – The Unsettled Dust, by Robert Aickman.