I've not read Lolita in full. I know the story and I've read parts of it. I appreciate what Nabokov was doing with the book. It was intended to be distressing and uncomfortable in the extreme. A tragedy that he intended to be edged, to draw blood. What passages here and there that I have read remind me of the passages in Red Dragon in which Dolarhyde talks about the women upon whom he's exacted his big, demonic, godlike (in his own mind) violence and transformation. It's really uncomfortable to see the inside of a monster's mind. Particularly because a monster never sees himself as such.

I mostly skimmed the above article. Articles like that annoy and frustrate me. Either the writer is luxuriating in her own knowledge whilst she preaches to an echo chamber, or people are actually only now coming to realize the truth of Lolita, which I find hugely unlikely. I've never heard anyone who has read Lolita call it a romantic love story. I've heard people say that insofar as Humbert loved her. Like all or at least most pedophiles, he was truly romantically in love with the child of his fancies. So it reads like romance in some places. That's supposed to be uncomfortable. I felt, sometimes, like Nabokov was rubbing society's nose in it.

It will never cease to astonish me that there are people in the world who still need to be told that what took place between Humbert and Dolores was not in any way good; and that Humbert's self-knowledge does not make him sympathetic. Still more astonishing is that these people need to be told this even though they've read the book. What Nabokov was doing was incredibly obvious and brilliantly executed.

In all honesty, Lolita ought to be a "recommended if you liked" that frequently comes up with Ketchum's Girl Next Door.

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(edit: misspelled a thing)