To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks, papers, etc.
I started Lolita this week, I’m currently on page 61. I have no idea why some people believe this is a p-do apologia, it took me only 10 pages to feel completely disgusted by Humbert Humbert, especially when he started talking about his “nymphets” 
. But as with Charles Kinbote, I have to say Humbert is a super funny narrator, the way he trashes Mrs Haze at every opportunity, so bitchy and so manipulative lmao, which makes him much scarier than Kinbote, who was unmistakably a schizo to everyone around him.
Sometimes I can’t believe Nabokov was Russian, his dominion over the English Language is quite impressive, even if he grew up in a trilingual environment, typical of the Russian aristocracy.
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i’m reading Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. breddy gud. about 120 pgs in right now. really slow start and hard to get thru at first because he tends to go on and on describing all the scenery, smells, sounds etc in very thorough detail, and instead of being immersive or beautiful his prose is just kind of clumsy imo. but now that the story has picked up its pace a little i’m interested enough to keep going.
in this world there are lots of strange species, including cactus people, bird people, little flying gremlin men, etc. the main characters are a human man and his gf who is an insect with a human body but a cockroach (?) for a head? and her species reproduces by the males (who are just sort of immature and unconscious grubs) inseminating her “headbelly” (?) and then she lays eggs (?) out of her head? also, i just read a s*x scene with her male human partner where she is described as “riding him”. ok but if she lays eggs out of her head to reproduce then why does she have a vagina?????
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I hate that fricking guy. I read Kraken and I wish I hadn't
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Some of his ideas were fun, but the prose in Kraken was at times among the worst I ever read, not just in books but including stuff like Reddit posts. Grammatically correct but alternating between extremely boring and trying too hard, with several passages that can only be described as cringe. One of the characters referenced the "I can has cheeseburger" meme and I should have put the book down then and there, but there was only like 50 pages left. It wasn't going to be a moral victory.
I'm still vaguely mad about it six years later.
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