Old Book Dip: Lolita

Dear Readers,

In short, a few things:

1. I’m pausing all paid subscriptions until further notice. THANK YOU to all of you who supported my work over the past two years!

2. I’m taking the summer to do two things: the first is to package up Theda’s Time Machine into a book and sell it. I’ve got some crazy marketing planned and I’ll share it at a later date. Especially if it works! And the second, to get back to my first love which is reading a pile of books. I scroll too much. Addictions are a nuisance.

Until I return with a new historical fiction project, I’ll be sharing a passage from the books in my library, especially the old codgers that age beautifully, with a randomly chosen passage, thus like the old game of Bible Dipping that kids did back in the day before there was Substack. I hope you enjoy it.

From Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita:

”And so we rolled East, I more devastated than braced with the satisfaction of my passion, and she glowing with health, her bi-iliac garland still as brief as a lad’s, although she had added two inches to her stature and eight pounds to her weight. We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night— the moment I feigned sleep.”

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