Here’s one of the stacks of books I have beside my bed. The floor is bare chip: we recently moved into our new loft extension, and pandemic lock-down has left us uncarpeted for longer than we anticipated.
I’ve been in the best of company, however. I’ll say more about the other books as they make their way up the stack, but in the last few days I’ve been back with old Vlad, the great master Nabokov. It was his Lolita that provided me with half the text-basis for my first undergraduate essay, fifteen years ago.
His language, the humour, style and verse, are still unrivalled. Witness:
what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
The Chronotopian 