For what it's worth: I don't think I read quite a hundred books a year, but somewhere up there, and for the past couple of years I've been on a kick with 19th Century novels. I see it completely as escapism. It's for pleasure and nothing else. I've been developing grand themes in my head about industrialization and society and economics and all that, but I'll never write a book, and I'm not even qualified to teach literature (certainly not anywhere where students would actually read books).
So it does me no good, and I know that, and I keep doing it anyway.
Edit: I've read everything Nabokov wrote, much of it twice, and even though I don't normally care about deconstructing artists or even knowing much about them at all, it's not unreasonable to notice his running themes about sexualized preteens and at least wonder why.
It just seems like we daily subject ourselves to torrents of opinions from the cripplingly incurious.
that's fucking true.
For what it's worth: I don't think I read quite a hundred books a year, but somewhere up there, and for the past couple of years I've been on a kick with 19th Century novels. I see it completely as escapism. It's for pleasure and nothing else. I've been developing grand themes in my head about industrialization and society and economics and all that, but I'll never write a book, and I'm not even qualified to teach literature (certainly not anywhere where students would actually read books).
So it does me no good, and I know that, and I keep doing it anyway.
Edit: I've read everything Nabokov wrote, much of it twice, and even though I don't normally care about deconstructing artists or even knowing much about them at all, it's not unreasonable to notice his running themes about sexualized preteens and at least wonder why.
Is there a single reference to the sexuality of a preteen anywhere in Pale Fire, arguably Nabokov’s greatest book?
I don't think so. I didn't mean to suggest all of his works had the theme. (My personal favorite is Ada, and it certainly does.)