Top 10| My Top Ten |
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A problem with speaking of my Top 10 ebooks is that I keep changing my mind. Today I am quite certain about what rates as the best, most gripping, fiction I've read for ages.  ... I cannot well explain the true nature of that urge of mine. It was allied, I suppose, to that swooning curiosity which impels one to examine with a magnifying glass bleak little figures - still life practically, and everybody about to throw up - at an early morning execution, and the patient's expression impossible to make out in the print. Anyway, I was literally gasping for breath, and one corner of the book of doom kept stabbing me in the stomach while I scanned and skimmed ...Well, I should say, the best that I have read this month. It's Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Forget the paedophilia nonsense that politics suffocates us with, forget the nonsense prudes wrote when the novel first appeared back in the dark fifties.
Lolita isn't a very weird book. It is a very powerful story, and it is strange because Lolita - Dolores Haze - is under age. But the passion that destroys the narrator, Humbert Humbert, is human love. It's a feeling that most people know once puberty has begun. Hopefully, most of us don't suffer the dose that swamps Humbert. Vladimir Nabokov struggled to get into print, and eventually it was picked up by a porn publisher. That was in 1955. But if the dirty mac brigade thought they were in for some steamy inspiration for onanism, they must have been limply disappointed. Read Lolita looking for sexual stimulation and you are going to be very disappointed. If you read it because you want a really well-written novel from a gifted author with an amazing vocabulary, if you want something really exciting which you won't be able to put down, you'll want Lolita on your eReader. Wikipedia has a good account of it, but in one or two places I wondered if their reviewer mightn't have been reading from a different script. It might be my fault. I rather rushed through the book - because I have a mountain of stories waiting to be consumed. For instance, suddenly along the way, the mother of Dolores Haze vanishes. There's a suggestion later that Humber has killed her, and Wikipedia has its own explanation. I remain in the dark about that and would welcome another reader's enlightening. Here it is as a PDF file, which makes it easy to download. Pop it into Calibre, or your favourite eBook format converter, and be ready for an extraordinary story, brilliantly written. I'm still working on this page, but here are some other stunning downloads in the running for my current Top Ten and all are PDF downloads. One has some advertising, not mine, and apologies for it. My top ten: |
