Erin's profile

77 ratings | 1 reviews
avg rating: 4.32

Erin's bookshelves

read (75)

currently-reading (5)

to-read (18)

Erin is currently reading

	07/01 Erin is currently reading: Stories of Anton Chekhov (Paperback) by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov bookshelves: currently-reading	my rating:
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	07/01 Erin is currently reading: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Paperback) by Jean-Dominique Bauby bookshelves: currently-reading	my rating:
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	07/01 Erin is currently reading: People of the Book: A Novel (Hardcover) by Geraldine Brooks bookshelves: currently-reading	my rating:
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Erin's recent updates (rss)

July 02

Erin gave

to:
The Enchanted April (New York Review Books Classics)
by Elizabeth von Arnim

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Erin marked as to-read:
The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir (Hardcover)
by Sarah Manguso
bookshelves: to-read

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Erin gave

to:
Autobiography of a Face (Paperback)
by Lucy Grealy

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July 01

Erin is currently reading:
Stories of Anton Chekhov (Paperback)
by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
bookshelves: currently-reading

my rating:

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Erin is currently reading:
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Paperback)
by Jean-Dominique Bauby
bookshelves: currently-reading

my rating:

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Erin is currently reading:
People of the Book: A Novel (Hardcover)
by Geraldine Brooks
bookshelves: currently-reading

my rating:

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June 05

Erin took the never-ending book quiz.

questions answered:	261
correct:	225 (86.2%)
skipped:	54
best streak:	24
questions added:	0

beat her score »

Erin gave

to:
Lolita (Penguin Modern Classics)
by Vladimir Nabokov

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Erin read and liked Carlos's review of Lolita (Penguin Modern Classics):

"Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories...more Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.

Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion: <blockquote> She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock. </blockquote> Much has been made of Lolita as metaphor, perhaps because the love affair at its heart is so troubling. Humbert represents the formal, educated Old World of Europe, while Lolita is America: ripening, beautiful, but not too bright and a little vulgar. Nabokov delights in exploring the intercourse between these cultures, and the passages where Humbert describes the suburbs and strip malls and motels of postwar America are filled with both attraction and repulsion, "those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads." Yet however tempting the novel's symbolism may be, its chief delight--and power--lies in the character of Humbert Humbert. He, at least as he tells it, is no seedy skulker, no twisted destroyer of innocence. Instead, Nabokov's celebrated mouthpiece is erudite and witty, even at his most depraved. Humbert can't help it--linguistic jouissance is as important to him as the satisfaction of his arrested libido. --Simon Leake...less "

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Erin's groups (recent posts)

Fontana Regional Library — 9 members — last activity 05/06/2008 09:29AM
Hey, FRL Employees! What are you reading?

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Erin's friends (11)

	Allie 98 books 11 friends
	Sarah 79 books 30 friends
	Tony 254 books 18 friends
	Bee 512 books 13 friends
	Helen 208 books 17 friends
	Alice 68 books 10 friends
	Kristina 32 books 13 friends
	Jeff 72 books 16 friends
	Elizabeth 70 books 6 friends
	James 3 books 10 friends
	Emily 44 books 7 friends

never-ending quiz

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questions answered:	261
correct:	225 (86.2%)
best streak:	24
questions added:	0

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