We Need to Talk About "Lolita" by Alex Snider

Lolita is a book you read twice, three times, four times but never once. Reading Lolita once will leave you feeling sorry for Humbert Humbert, blaming Dolores, resenting Nabokov for making you a little hot under the collar (only for the first half, the 'tease' leaves you wanting the rest of the novel), in other words: you will miss the whole point.

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A Stolen Moment from the Lives of GB and Al #33

The following is a true story.

I had just arrived home from my beloved Nabokov class and all my lil' synapses were firing. We had been talking about Lolita and my professor sent us home to read Poe's Annabel Lee, from which my boyfriend had referenced from frequently throughout Lolita.

I cracked open my Poe anthology and expressed my desire to create a database for a catalogue of all the short stories we have so that I could easily find what I was looking for (I stand by this idea, I just need someone who is good at computers to do it for me...). Rebekah looked up the story and low and behold it's actually a poem, which she found online precisely at the same moment I found it in the anthology and then we...

(What happens next is something I'm not proud of... Except that I am...)

... Read it together, aloud, each taking a line at a time.

Yep, that just happened.

And, we may or may not have used funny voices.

Happy Friday, everyone.

Nabokovvvvvvvvvvvv!!!!!! by Alex Snider

Today, I embark on a journey that will culminate with me becoming the preeminent Nabokovian scholar. That being, I begin my course on my long-dead (*come on Zombie-apocalypse*) boyfriend. Oh, can you even imagine having Vladimir for a boyfriend? He'd be the one that you'd try and impress by being all serious and smart and never fart in front of.

Been there, bought the nerdiest t-shirt ever. A side-note, this picture was ridiculously hard to take with my computer without making my breasts look like watermelons hence the terrible, half-shimmy, "who's your daddy" pose/face.

But, I digress... As you can see I am a little enamoured with the greatest writer of all time; his prose has actually brought me to tears; he is the kind of author in who's novels you would write in the margins, underlining ferociously because while you had never perceived the world that way but now that image, that thought is branded in your mind and you will never be the same. John Updike described his writing as such: "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, ecstatically", which incidentally also describes how I feel reading his prose; for reals, I get goose-bumps.

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