GUILT.

Admission - I have been neglecting my Nabokov.

But! For good reason. Reason which takes the form of a beautiful novel by a brilliant Canadian woman: Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace . (At long last, I have mastered the art of the HTML 'underline' tags and can stop butchering my citations!)

The novel is beautiful, epic, engrossing .... and it is keeping me from my Nabokov. I feel tremendously guilty, as though I have been standing someone up.

So this is just a formal note to say - I have almost finished the beauty that is Alias Grace and will be beginning Nabokov's Despair by the beginning of the week. Regrettably (or mercifully, I suppose, depending on your position) I won't be doing a second post on Sebastian Knight - but only because I think it's high time I get this project moving and start in on a new novel. So I shan't wait until I am finished reading Despair to begin posting on it.

So, that's all. Sorry, V.N. I really do adore you, but I cannot read your books one after another, because you are simply too brilliant. Thankfully, waiting in the wings for me to lurch off the Nabokovian stage and grope amongst the world of fiction, are so ... many ... books ...