Does book-browsing in a foreign country count as a way of doing ethnography of the public intellectual culture of that place? I like to think so. Bloemfontein, where I have been spending this week at a workshop, and doing other bits and bobs, has a decent range of bookshops – at least two branches of Exclusive Books, the nation-wide bookstore, but also a good University-related Protea bookstore. There are a lot more Afrikaans-language books here than in Durban, where I have spent most of my time in South African before now, not surprisingly (including a Christian family bookstore called CUM books, believe it or not). The politics of Afrikaner identity is very much alive a live issue in the Free State, it seems.

Anyway, on my observation, there are a few publishing trends which seem interesting. One is the blossoming of SA-based and authored crime fiction – although more interesting, I think, is the work of Lauren Beukes, who writes sci-fi, of a sort, but really dystopic urban noir about South African cities the day after tomorrow – I am half way through Moxyland,  based in a near-future Cape Town, and have Zoo City, about Johannesburg, packed in the bag to take home.

There are also a lot of books about contemporary ANC politics, more than there were a decade ago or less even, some of them histories or biographies, and an interesting series of short books on current hot topics published by Jacana press, as well as lots of things about ANC politics right now, a month or so away from the big Indaba to be held here in Mangaung, where the conflicts about the Zuma leadership will be settled, one way or the other.

If I were here longer, I’d be reading all these – South African TV is designed to encourage reading. But I’m here just for a fleeting visit, enough only to start the newly published biography of JM Coetzee (600 pages, and he doesn’t write a novel ’til 200+ pages in – and nor had he led an exciting life before that), and the ever wonderful Ivan Vladislavic’s short collection The Loss Library, about writing-projects imagined and/or started but never completed – a topic close to my own heart.