Favorite Sentence: Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire

" 'Speaking of novels,' I said, 'you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust's rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described--by Cocteau, I think--as 'a mirage of suspended gardens,' and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski's (and Lyovin's) thick neck, and a cupid's buttocks for cheeks; but--and now let me finish sweetly--we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau tenebreux the capacity of evoking 'human interest': it is there, it is there--maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenth-centuryish, brand, but it is there.' " (pages 161 - 162)

Where Are the Sentences?

When I started this blog, it was my intention to post a favorite sentence every couple of weeks or so. This meant that by the end of each month I would have at least two favorite sentences up for said month, and possibly as many as four.

As you can see, for the month of December this has not been the case. For the record this is not going to be one of those blogs that will start and then die out soon after. Well, it may do that eventually, but for now I'm still here, and I'm still reading. I just haven't picked up the right books lately.

I had high hopes for Siobhan Fallon's You Know When the Men Are Gone, but I just couldn't hang with it. Got to page twenty or so and had to stop, found myself drifting, and I usually don't drift. Matthew Bondurant's The Third Translation and Andrew Davidson's Gargoyle both met with the same fate. Recently my wife asked why I even tried reading these books. I want to try everything, I said.

I used to feel compelled to slog through every book I started. I had to finish no matter what, even if I was not enjoying what I read. That compulsion has largely fallen away and now I'm much more discerning, I give a book at most fifty pages before deciding whether or not to continue. I feel this is fair. I know my own books are given this same litmus test.

I'm reading Nabokov's Pale Fire now and hope to have my favorite sentence up for that work within the next few days. December is looking to be a one-sentence month, but it will be a great sentence.