Lo. Lee. Ta.

My book club is reading Lolita by Nabokov. I put away a 50-page chunk over the past few days and then read the equivalent of Cliff's notes online. (Those smarty-pants Harvard kids have an excellent study guide here: http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/lolita/.)

There's some gorgeous writing in here.

This passage is a description of Lolita's mother. (The narrator of the story is Humbert Humbert, Lolita's soon to be lover.)

I think I had better describe her right away, to get it over with. The
poor lady was in her middle thirties, she had a shiny forehead, plucked
eyebrows and quite simple but not unattractive features of a type that may be
defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich.

And I love this bit here, where Humbert describes Lolita picking up stones with her feet and throwing them:

After a while she sat down next to me on the lower step of the back porch and
began to pick the pebbles between her feet--pebbles, my God, then a curled bit
of milk-bottle glass resembling a snarling lip--and chuck them at a can. Ping. You can't a second time--you can't hit it--this is agony--a
second time. Ping.

The imagery is just amazing and the summary points out a lot of fascinating ideas about the way the book is structured (as a type of confessional, written to a judge or jury) and Nabokov's interest in American kitsch and detective fiction.

The only problem is, I can't read the thing. I have to admit that I want to read fiction to escape--not only into an author's "love affair" with the English language (Nabokov's words) but into the mind of a protagonist and a world I'd like to experience. And I tell you, no matter how beautiful the word, Lolita is not that place for me.