What Are You Reading 2015 - Page 9

On January 25 2015 06:54 Nyxisto wrote:
Anybody here read the Dark Tower series? I'm currently reading the fourth book (the first three were pretty nice) but how could King think that it would be a good idea to put 600 pages of background story into one book? Does the rest of the series continue that way or does it get better again?

On January 25 2015 18:51 corumjhaelen wrote:
Finally read The Three Stigmatas of Palmer Eldritch, and my mind is blown. Thanks guys, it's up there with Ubik. I have a problem with Barney's last packet of cigarettes btw, not sure why.

On January 26 2015 04:00 dmnum wrote:
Nabokov could write and read in English he could in Russian. He grew up trilingual.

And sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who doesn't think he's a genius.

Nabokov’s “Lolita” is the third book. Its penultimate sentence, “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art,” strikes me as one of the loveliest sentences anyone ever wrote. Nabokov’s aurochs recall those big beasts bounding across the ancient cave walls in Altamira and Lascaux—the wellsprings of human art—while the angels signal art’s apotheosis. He’s speaking of only the greatest sonnets, the greatest paintings; we enter the realm of Shakespeare’s “powerful rhyme,” to which royalty’s marble and gilded monuments stand subservient, or of the “small patch of yellow wall” with which Proust enshrined Vermeer.

It’s also the moment in the book when Nabokov comes closest to stepping free of both his tortured narrator, Humbert Humbert, and Humbert’s tortuous prose. Nabokov is delivering a credo, and the cadence and the sentiment tightly echo the voice at the conclusion of perhaps his most beautiful poem, “On Discovering a Butterfly”:

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
Poems that take a thousand years to die,
But ape the immortality of this …

I’m tempted to call “Lolita” ’s penultimate sentence an apologia, but apologias are rarely so trumpetlike, so coruscating and clarion in their delivery. And this apologia also carries, in its peerless high-mindedness, not a plea for forgiveness but a hint of reproach, as if saying to the reader, “And you thought you were reading a tawdry and often sickening tale? You thought my ultimate concern was with a rank and shameless child molester, the sort of scheming fiend who raises his young charge’s nickel-and-dime allowance when she performs for him special sexual favors? Didn’t you see that my vision was, all along, focussed on only the loftiest things?”

On January 30 2015 08:09 bookwyrm wrote:
read it along with something else, a little at a time. it's beautiful