[scratchmonkey]

Martin Amis - Night Train

[scratchmonkey]

I re-read Moby Dick again.

It's still fucking good.

[scratchmonkey]

Yeah, Gravity's Rainbow never stops being The Great Postmodern Novel Blah Blah Blah Now Here's a Musical Sequence and Lots of Tangents.

It's still really good.

[scratchmonkey]

Well yeah, and that's sort of the beauty of it. There's a lot of tangents before you get there though and maybe you should even spoiler-text your post? I dunno. I knew the ending of the book before I read due to an overly-enthusiastic high school teacher and still enjoyed it.

[scratchmonkey]

I'm in the mood for a Lolita discussion. I think we've had this before, screw it though, full steam ahead. Anybody else read it?

Highlights of when I was reading it: I was reading it at work and the co-worker who thinks that he's everybody's intellectual superior* came over to comment on it. He said that he didn't like it, that Humbert was "a dork" and that Lolita "just needed to grow up".

I've just been talking about it with dhex and he shared with me the information that in one of his wife's lit classes, there were female students who were sympathetic with Humbert. Not that they felt some sympathy for Humbert, that they identified and felt he was a sympathetic character. Which is pretty boggling/scary, although on one hand I understand it because Nabokov is such a good writer and Humbert is so sincere about his perceived right to his manipulations that it becomes hard to say "this man is sick". I'd compare it to In Cold Blood in terms of entering the mind of a sociopath and the power associated with such.

* - We called him CBG behind his back because he had all the physical characteristics and most of the vocal ones of Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. We only found out months after that he'd left the company that his previous job was in fact running a comic book store.