Ada

Lolita was lovely and Pale Fire transcendent, so when our platinum guest room customer revealed that she liked Ada so much she named her daughter after it, I figured it needed to get bumped up to the top of the list.  However, while I now better appreciate the kinkiness unexpectedly hidden beneath CV's demure exterior, I can't say that I'm especially grateful for the suggestion.  For me at least, Ada was simply too much.  I don't mean this in a moral sense of course.  I'm a goer.  Reading about a trio of insatiablly incestuous 13 year olds is all in a day's work around here.  No, I mean that the 600 page torrent of esoteric vocabulary, recondite allusions, puns in 3 different languages, fractured narration, etc ... was simply too much for me.  I sorta enjoyed the novel as an interestingly perverse love story and an examination of the rememberance, and restructuring, of things past.  But at some point I gave up hope of really understanding whatever it was that Nabakov wanted to accomplish here.  Hopefully he at least made himself smile and reminisce ...