/lit/ - Literature

>cross-country road trip detailing the adventures of a man and his step-daughter where they live, love, and laugh, visit ice cream stands, go for walks in the forest, and grow closer together

If you have not read Lolita yet, I recommend you stay out of this thread.


So I just finished it. How did others think of it? As for me, I loved the first part. It was Humbert at his most jovial, and so had the most fun prose, in my opinion. The second part seemed to drag on and on, though, and Humbert got more and more down trodden. This isn't to say, however, that the writing was poor - the prose (which has been said thousands of times) is spectacular, and anything read aloud from this book sounds like poetry.

I just felt lost. It seemed to me that part 2, while being a mite larger than part 1, contained a whole lot less. But then we meet Lolita at her home, and she tells him waterproof, and I can't quite remember what was up with that but flip back, and then everything begins to click, and I realize that I was only lost because I was asleep at the wheel, so to speak. It is true that the second part is longer, but it is not true that less was happening. It turns out that I had just not been paying attention. Flipping back through the whole thing I see it clear as day that Quilty was their pursuer. There almost is no chapter in which he isn't referenced. There's even the line where he specifically mentions that the playwright (Quilty) had ripped on Joyce - well, their pursuer was well read, of course.

It seems to me that the first part is all introduction, and the second part is the true 'novel'. I just can't believe how much was going on right before my eyes I missed. But I can't help but wonder - despite the lucid prose, and interesting characters, and well written humor, isn't this, in the end, a bit of a detective novel (Humbert loved french detective novels when he was young)? What carries it to be considered one of the greatest English novels of the 20th century, in your opinion?

reading this book made me feel aroused, am I just like Humbert?
Did you read the book in disgust?

Hey /lit/!

I can't fucking wait for this next semester to start. I'm taking a class called Evil and Transgression and I just got the book list.

Dracula- Stoker
Theif's Journal- Genet
Lolita- Nabokov
American Psycho- Ellis
Painted Bird-Nosinski
The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things-Leroy
Secret History-Tart
Fight Club- Palahniuk
Eichmann in Jerusalem- Arendt

I'm fucking stoked. But it looks like we're reading a lot of shir set in WW2...hope we don't spend the whole class talking about how evil the Holocaust was...

God. Damn. This book man. Just finished Lolita for the first time. Probably will re-read it immediately starting maybe a week from now.
What major works of literature have you finished recently /lit/?

>inb4 404

What is the psychology behind pedophilia?

>thinking people will look at you weird for reading this
>reading this on my way to work a few years back
>on bus
>empty seat next to me
>mother gets on with young daughter, tells her to sit next to me

Maybe it'd look weird if you're always wearing a trenchcoat and fedora with a Pedobear pin that you bought in the "Artist" Alley of an anime convention.

Pic related, it's the cover I had.