Lectures on Literature Vladimir Nabokov
6/20/2026
I looked at the preview of “Lectures on Literature” by Vladimir Nabokov. It’s inexpensive 11.99 on Amazon, but its not a Kindle Book. The book is an e-text book. This is discouraging I was planning to use Speechify to read the Kindle book to me. But the E textbook requires certain devices such as a Kindle reader. It’s explained here on Amazon link provided.
I still have not bought the book. I can only read the beginning or the preview part which is free. As a Literary Blogger I probably have no excuse for not getting a Kindle reader or a Fire tablet but I’ve had them in the past and they were slow and also buggy. They’ve probably changed and they’re a lot better now. Still I don’t want to spend money on another device right now. So I decided to just go ahead and review what I could get for free. I believe that in the future I’ll be able to get this in a format that I can send to have it read for me by an AI voice.
What’s really fascinating is the opening essay where Nabokov talks about what he thinks one should be as a good reader. He also has a concept of what a good author should be. Nabokov provides a list of requirements to be a good reader and one of them is a dictionary which is a truly outdated concept. As a child with dyslexia and ADHD I felt tortured by being forced to look words up in the dictionary. I’ve always hated this labor ever since.
Did anybody stop reading Lolita use a dictionary and then go look up the French in it? The answer is no because this would break up the continuity of the reading process. The annotated Lolita should have translated all of the French text but it did not. Because the person entrusted to annotate Lolita Alfred Appel actually got a lot of information wrong. The entire annotated section of Lolita is not worth reading. Even Vladimir Nabokov commented that the annotations are less about his work and more about the annotators personal opinions. The annotated version of Lolita is like reading a second book by a different author which has many suppositions that are not researched meticulously.
As good author Nabokov should not have used French in Lolita and let us have a deeper and richer story. I did later translate the French. I found there’s nothing really important in the French in Lolita that makes the story that much better or worse. One need not fret over the French in Lolita or even bothered to translate it out.
It’s kind of similar to what David Foster Wallace did in Infinite Jest with the footnotes. Nobody’s going to stop reading the book and then go to the footnotes. Especially when the footnotes are not connected many times to the actual text. They seem more like adjuncts to the text.
Nabokov says that books should appeal not to the heart or to the brain, but to the spine. I still don’t really understand what he means by this, but apparently he means one should feel a tingle of excitement while reading a book. This has never happened to me. There is not a single book that gives me a tingle of excitement as if my Mystery Date was now knocking on the door. I propose that if you feel this way about reading a book you’re engaging in it in a possibly destructive way that is over exciting your nervous system. If social media is making you feel this way you probably need to do a social media detox. I share what most people believe. We want to be entertained not manipulated. Books should be a pleasure and the pleasure should be all pleasurable not stressful.
I provided for your convenience all the books considered in the book
Lectures on Literature.
Mansfield Park — Jane Austen
Bleak House — Charles Dickens
Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — Robert Louis Stevenson
The Walk by Swann’s Place (Swann’s Way) — Marcel Proust
The Metamorphosis — Franz Kafka
I’m probably most interested in Swann’s Way out of all of these.
Nabokov is terribly snobbish about the books that he likes and does not like. He doesn’t like even the most famous Russian writers Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Their absence is most noticeable from this collection because Nabokov would be somebody who could really give us a great perspective had he chosen to tackle them based on his background being born in 1899 in Saint Petersburg Russia.
Updated: 7/10/2026
I discovered the writer David Long in The New Yorker Archives. He has written a large number of New Yorker stories over the years. When I went to look him up on Wikipedia I found this quote from Wikipedia.
In his craft talk “Nine Sentences,” which was later published in the anthology When the Rewards Can Be So Great, David Long writes about “dangerous sentences.” Long says, “The sentences I’m referring to do sometimes shock, but more often they give us an odd shiver, a feeling of momentary displacement, or of being differently awake. Likewise, newness is vital, but it’s a by-product, not the thing itself. What I so much crave when I read, and recognize in these few amazing sentences, is the sound of someone’s mind working at a peak of concentration. Originality is the outcome of that deep attention.”
I wonder if writers want their writing to be memorable and this is why they want to shock people. If nothing was shocking maybe people would find the writing forgettable? David Long wants people to perhaps have a different sense of awareness. I still feel that the role of the fiction writer is to entertain. There are many ways to entertain. Writing can be interesting, amusing, or informative, but I still feel that the best writing shouldn’t manipulate. It’s easy for modern writers to try and write the most shocking stories possible. This is a shortcut when a writer is not skilled enough to be memorable without shock value.
David Long’s stories can be found in New Yorker Archives for free.
The New Yorker Archives have become free even to non subscribers because they contain ads. I am not sure exactly when this transition happened. But I believe this is a positive thing. Now people who can’t afford an expensive subscription can enjoy poems and short stories for free. I have a New Yorker subscription. I was surprised to find I could access the archives while I was logged out. I’m not the communist but I believe that ones literary ambitions for reading should not be hampered by economic considerations.
Updated:7/27/2026
I looked for the story Concerning the Bodyguard by Donald Barthelme 1978. I could no longer view the archive when I was not logged in. The New Yorker Archives have improved a lot over the years but they’re still very difficult to look at as I wish to systematically view certain years to search for some interesting fiction stories that I found in the 90s. They have the years listed backwards starting from December 31st and working their way around to January 1st. The table of contents is not easy to view when I’m trying to scan for stories. They have ads but I don’t care because I barely notice them at all. I can’t even think of what one of the ads was about.
Macy Makes Magic 