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“And as we pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called ‘sage brush� appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic.�

I’ve been trying to think of something meaningful to say about this book, but I just don’t feel capable of properly describing Nabokov’s obsessive, almost incestuous relationship with words, or the linguistic pyrotechnics displayed on every page. Elaborate wordplay, multilingual puns, more allusions than anyone could hope to understand. Famously described as a love letter to the English language, if you worship beauty in its myriad forms, you’ll almost certainly love this book.