fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #1374 ]

[ SECRET POST #1374 ]

⌈ Secret Post #1374 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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148. [SPOILERS for Persona 4]

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149. [SPOILERS for Psych]

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150. [TRIGGER WARNING for non-con/incest]

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151. [TRIGGER WARNING for non-con/dub-con]

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152. [TRIGGER WARNING for lolicon]

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153. [TRIGGER WARNING for self-harm]

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Notes:

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Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I bought this book a while ago but I haven't had much time to really get into it. What is everyone's opinions on it? No spoilers! Or anything.

Read above lol
Sorry, I never read the book but I have heard of it. I have a friend who loves it if that helps.

It's one of those boring, mouldy, often-praised classics everyone's read that nobody has actually read.
Probably not even OP, I'm guessing.

Boring?? Really???

I am honestly startled here. I've never heard anyone call it boring before.

I usually respect you, man. Why would you say a shitty thing like this?

Yeah, was a shitty thing to say. Sorry.

It's okay, I'm glad you apologized.

Some of the actual writing is really good, but it's mostly one of those books you read so you can tell everyone how incredibly smart and literary you are. It's not too boring a read as classics go, but I only got about halfway through tbh.

I read it, and it was alright. The writing's really good in places — the inner monologues especially get tangled in interesting ways — but the gratuitous French got on my nerves. (I sided with Dolores on that as many other things; Humbert used it way too much.) I only really remember one scene that could be described as in-the-moment lewd, but after that most things are just stated to have happened without much detail (thus why OP was disappointed).

Even though I got spoiled on the ending, it didn't come about in a way I'd suspected, but there are definitely some passages at the end that gut-punched me enough to make the lulls worth working through.

It's the best book I have ever read (it bothers me that someone said it's "one of those books you read so you can tell everyone how incredibly smart and literary you are" -- WTF it's not even hard to read). The prose is engaging; Nabokov has a poetic way of writing that's not overly so (lots of alliteration and other techniques make some of the passages pretty fun to read out loud). The subject matter is disturbing but the book itself is beautiful, even though you're basically reading the confessions of a child rapist who wants you to feel bad for him.

It does kind of help if you're familiar with French as a language, though it's not necessary

Edited 2010-10-08 22:22 (UTC)

Yo I said that, and yes I agree it is not very hard to read at all. But it's undeniable that it's a book that is regarded as a rather intellectual literary classic, and some people will think you are 'smart' for having read it - so if you want to be pretentious then it's definitely one you need to read ;)

(before anyone gets offended and thinks I'm calling everyone who likes the book pretentious or something silly like that - I'm joking)

Yeah, but it sounded like you were discouraging anon from reading the book, and those are some dumb reasons not to read a book. Also, nobody I know thinks of Lolita as a pretentious book, "pretentious" would be more like The Bell Jar or Catcher in the Rye or something

This does remind me of the time I was at a cafe and I saw a college-aged woman dressed in a beret and 60's mod-style dress sipping coffee and reading Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead with her wrist holding the spine flayed out in such a position that I found it impossible to interpret that she was doing it for any other reason than to look "intellectual" (in which case, she picked the wrong book). I hope she lost a bet or something, because LOL

I guess what is considered 'pretentious' differs depending on what kind of people you hang out with :T Totally agree about The Bell Jar and Catcher in the Rye though - was forced to read them in school and they only made me despise the authors. I also actually read the entirety of the Fountainhead and enjoyed it in a sort of "Wow, this is messed up!" way. Even I couldn't get through Atlas Shrugged though, ughhh, what a trainwreck (lol) of a book.

Re: OT

iapetusneume.livejournal.com - 2010-10-09 01:37 (UTC) - Expand

Re: OT

(Anonymous) - 2010-10-11 00:01 (UTC) - Expand

It depends on what you value in a book, really. It's beautifully, lyrically written, full of black humor, and open-ended. But it's not straightforward or entertaining in the strictest sense.

I guess: worth reading as literature, but not as a diversion.

Nabokov is a master of the unreliable narrator.

The prose is stupendous. I admittedly took a long time to read it and lost my copy so I haven't even finished it (derp), but I thought it was very engaging and Nabokov is pretty fantastic all told.

And so what if it's a book that "everyone" reads to look smart and literary, so are many beautiful and worthwhile books. They do, uh, make you smart and literary-looking for a reason, not just because someone randomly picked them out of a hat. Even though sometimes it seems that way.

it's a really beautiful, heartbreaking book.

One of the best books ever written.

I think it depends on the kind of books you like to read. Not much happens? The prose style is the kind that you either love or hate, so if you can't get past the first couple of chapters that's a pretty good indication that you won't like the rest of the book. Humbert is unrepentantly the worst, and Lolita herself is a very young teenager and acts like it - so obviously there's a lot of pathos there but it's difficult to like her particularly because you see so few glimpses of the kind of person she is or the kind of person she'll grow up to be, since that's not what Humbert's interested in. So yeah, I loved it but you might not, it really depends. It's not a very long book though, I'd say somewhere in the 200-300 page range, so.

It's one of my favorites. Very beautiful, but as many have said, very heartbreaking.

It's also very dense, if my be so bold to compare Nabokov, like Dickens and Tolkien, but to me that means every time I read it, I discover something new.

Lovely, lovely, lovely.

How much do the abuse of French and trite literary allusions bother you? That will directly correlate to how much you'll enjoy the book.

...Though as I was pounced on for dissing Nabokov before, I'll add that he's doing it intentionally to create a loathsome protagonist; the writer himself is brilliant, and in my opinion succeeds far too well. I found it almost unreadable my abject hatred of the protagonist was so strong.

It starts off like an Edgar Allen Poe story. In fact, there are hints of Poe's The Tell-Tale heart and the poem, Annabel Lee. Very, very creepy. Then it turns tragic with all of these seriously screwed up characters.

I liked the book but it's not a cheery one. And not exactly a feel good story. Really worth a read if only to see the world through the eyes of a child molester who is trying to convince himself that everything he is doing is okay.

I liked it but it's pretty fucking depressing. I was expecting an almost vampiric, awesomely-twisted sort of story from like a nightmarish predatory point of view or something, but it was much less...glamorizing than that. Just fucked-up people fucking each other over. In the end it's mostly very sad. Really well-written, definitely worth a read, but not the ~fucked-up pedo opus~ I thought it'd be.

I'm going to be the odd one out and say that I HATED Lolita. I didn't find it that engaging and it made me feel physically sick. I didn't even end up finishing it.

It's a beautiful, brilliant book. It's about a horrible situation but features the most downright beautiful writing of Navokov's novels.

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."

I would recommend Pale Fire equally, as it happens. A poem, a book, a curio. Possessing unlimited beauty, surprise, madness. Nabokov will make you long for something you can't identify, something you didn't know you ever wanted. And then he will rip it from under your feet. And then pat himself on the back for being a genius.

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[ SECRET POST #1374 ]

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