Over the Memorial Day weekend, the place we were staying at had a copy of Nabokov's Lectures on Literature. I didn't have the time to read the whole thing, but I read his takes on Mansfield Park and Ulysses, as well as the more general introduction.
Nabokov is a very perceptive reader, as you'd expect, and it's a pleasure to read his lecture notes. But this collection is also indirectly a guide to reading Nabokov. We learn that he thinks social concerns are irrelevant to great literature, that all great novels create an imaginary world rather than being purely mimetic, that form is inseparable from content, and so on.
One big surprise for me is that he feels that Joyce's stylistic choices in the second half of Ulysses aren't relevant to an analysis. That is, he spends all his time analyzing the events, with the occasional note about verbal effects, without addressing the fact that one chapter is catechistic, while another is in the form of a play, and so on. I think that form and content here are intimately related, and it seems that Nabokov, who's so caught up in stylistic choices, would dismiss these choices with one sentence.
I've started listening to Middlemarch, which is in a way an inverse of War and Peace. Whereas the latter is a long kaleidoscopic novel covering a number of Russian areas over 10 years, Middlemarch is a minutely observed view of the small town of Middlemarch. Not much else to say about it, yet.
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