Ill-Gotten Nabokov
(It just seems to work out this way.)
Part One: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov.
My husband and I are big fans of used book sales, and for several years one of the biggest sales we attended was at the Stone Ridge School in Maryland. (Sadly, the school discontinued that sale a while ago.) The sale spanned the school’s enormous gymnasium and auditorium, and it was hard not to leave the place schlepping my own weight in used books.
One year, I was sitting on the bleachers taking a breather (hey, walking around looking at all those books is tiring!) and glanced down at a stack of books next to me. People tend to leave books they don’t want piled up everywhere at these sales, so I assumed that if I found an unattended pile, anything in it was fair game.
A copy of The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov caught my eye right away; he’s one of those writers I always feel guilty about not reading more often. The book had an eye-catching cover and at the used price, it was quite a bargain. So I snapped it up.
And then the owner of that pile came back from wherever he’d been. Oops. And judging from the very intent way he went through that pile, he’d noticed the absence of the Nabokov right away.
I don’t know why I didn’t just say Oh, you set those aside? Sorry, and give the book back, but I felt like I’d violated some kind of unspoken book sale code and was too sheepish to admit what I did. Somehow, it seemed less embarrassing to scoop up my own pile of books (with the Nabokov well hidden) and scuttle off.
Sorry about that, Mr. Sale Guy. I didn’t mean to be a pile poacher.
Part Two: Lolita.
I first read Lolita when I was still in high school. It was never assigned for class, but I was curious. I knew only two things about it: that it was considered quite scandalous, and that the heart-shaped sunglasses I bought whenever we went to Commander Salamander in Georgetown were called “Lolitas.”
So I read it, and I really didn’t get the big deal. (Note: After reading the book again as an adult, I doubt like hell I really read much of Lolita the first time. Nabokov’s prose would have been tough sledding for me back then.) I was just about the most naive teenager in the world, and most of the novel likely went sailing over my head. And there weren’t even any heart-shaped sunglasses.
One afternoon a few years ago when I was taking the subway home from work, there was an abandoned pile of things on a seat by the one I chose. Stacked up next to me were two Modern Family DVDs and a battered old copy of Lolita.
I’d been meaning to reread Lolita anyhow, suspecting that it would make a lot more sense to forty-something me. I picked the book up, thumbed through it, and found that it had been heavily annotated by a previous owner. And I just can’t resist that kind of thing. I love to see what jumps out to other readers, what causes them to underline things multiple times and draw exclamation points in the margin and jot down hasty notes about how what they’ve just read applies to their own lives. (This is also why I like the “highlight” function on Medium; it’s as if someone on the staff figured out how to do this on a computer screen. Neat!)
I left the DVDs behind, but I took the book.
This is part of the Ninja Writers May Post-A-Day Challenge. If you enjoyed this, I’d ❤ a recommend heart. You can find a listing of my fiction on Medium here, and I blog occasionally over at my personal website.
