6/20/2026
I looked at the preview of “Lectures on Literature” by Vladimir Nabokov. It’s inexpensive on Kindle, but I don’t think it’s worth buying. The book is not on Google Playbooks which I now prefer to Kindle because I recognize that the whole Amazon system is designed extract maximum money for minimum value. I have hundreds of Audible books that I bought over a period of many years, but now that they’ve reduced the sound quality I don’t enjoy listening to them any longer.
What’s really fascinating is the opening essay where he 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 Nabokov provides a list of requirements To be a good reader and one of them is a dictionary which is a truly outdated concept.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 he entrusted to annotate Lolita actually got a lot of information wrong and the entire annotated section of Lolita is not worth reading has very little information of significance.
As good author Nabokov should not have used French in Lolita at all 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. you’ll still get the full story either way.
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.
The strangest thing of all he 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.
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. Maybe someday I’ll buy this book but I’m sworn to only use audiobooks and only use them with narrators who I enjoy. This is a Harvard Book and therefore it’s not likely anyone’s ever going to read it or that they’ll ever have an AI to read it. I think that at some time in the future if you buy a Kindle book there’ll be an option to have an AI read it to you in a voice with the accent that one prefers. I’ll just wait for that time and then maybe I’ll evaluate what he says about these other books.
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.
Macy Makes Magic 