I rescued this from the lost and found at my school. I read it a long time ago in college. It'll be available until I can pass it along.

I'm sending this to the most recent winner of the Classics Sweeps. Enjoy!

Received in the mail today - heard about this book, never read it so I'm EXCITED to receive this!!!! Thank you!!!

This is a very well written novel, outlining Humbert Humbert's arrival into Dolores Haze's life and how he was able to travel around the US with her enabling his own fantasies - until ultimately Dolores escapes his clutches. Followed by a rather unexpected revenge killing at the end......

Sent to the winner of the Classics sweeps - hope you enjoy!

Thank you! I read Lolita early on in my early bookcrossing days but didn't get on well with it. I'm intrigued to see if, more than a decade later, my feelings change on second reading.

Over the last year or two I've reread a few books from my 20s and my impressions are often very different. The first time I read Lolita I really didn't like it. I found it a weird mixture of sensationalism and dullness.

This time round - though it's not a favourite and I skim read lots - I did overall appreciate it a lot more. On the surface it's a novel about sex and love, but underneath, as with almost all sexual violence, it's mostly about power. Humbert delights in controlling Lolita. He loves to imagine her as having power over him, simply for the delight of conquering her over and over again. It's sick and hateful. But Nabokov also gives Lolita agency - she is no passive victim. She struggles to take whatever power and control she can within the relationship. I liked her. The tragedy of the story is that her opportunities for personal empowerment are so limited. As Humbert says regarding her motives early on into their sexual relationship, "She simply had nowhere else to go."

The most awful thing about this particular copy of the book is the front cover and blurb. Calling Lolita a love story is revolting in my opinion. Calling it 'the only convincing love story of our century' is utterly absurd. Lines like that play into the myth that sexual violence can be romantic and that abusers can be heroes within those stories.

From a me-too perspective, I think Nabokov's novel stands up pretty well as a complex tale of cultural and sexual tussles for control/empowerment/respect, and the evil that lurks within some men. Humbert is somewhat the ultimate in toxic masculinity! But some older interpretations of the novel as seen on the covers here just need to be banished from the 21st century. They are deeply concerning in tone.

Released at the official Bookcrossing Convention in Falkirk - woohoo!

If you are new to bookcrossing - welcome and congratulations for finding a book! Please leave a journal entry to let me and any other readers know where it has gone and what you thought of it.

I was lucky enough to study under Andrew Field, Nabokov's biographer, at Griffith University in the Seventies. Lolita, as Nabokov's most prominent work, came in for some discussion.

A brilliant book. Not really about sex, despite all the hype and outrage. Definitely not a love story.

A bit like Moby Dick where the whale is cover for the true subject: an unhealthy obsession. The clever, literate, dainty Humbert Humbert is captivated by Lolita, an artless teenager who occupies, for a short time, the shell of a past love unconsummated on a beach and forever preying on the mind of the narrator looking to recapture a moment that never happened in a "princedom by the sea".

An extraordinary book given impetus by the sensational subject matter.

Forget the all-but-nonexistent sex, forget the near-incest, the statutory rape, even the wonderful roamings around the America of "On the Road" and McCarthy.

The content is secondary to the style. This is a joy to read. Here is English as she should be wrote.

I dare not release this into the wild. Like the book with a cover image of a countdown timer that brought Sea-Tac Airport to a halt in the early days of BookCrossing, if I were to leave this within ten kilometres of a school, or worse, if it were to be found by a person under the age of consent, or even worse, both at the same time, there might be hell to pay and Questions asked in Parliament.

"It is a novel," I would protest, "a very fine one," but police have no literary souls and no love in their hearts for an aging book lover fondly remembering his university days with the help of not a madeleine but a lolita.

Dear finder, read this book and enjoy Nabokov's finest hour.