----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 11:57 AM
Subject: my first time
Imagine -- the very middle of the '60s and I'm stuck in high school.
But once a week a radio program ('the Radio Free University of the Air' I
think it was called) used to keep me from insanity. One evening I was introduced
to Pnin -- love at first hearing. The next morning I had to explain to my
family what was so funny that I was laughing out loud at one o'clock in the
morning. I think it was Pnin driving a car, or perhaps Pnin enjoying his
laundry.
I quickly progressed to Lolita and was lost to any other
American contemporary writer.
Carolyn
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EDNOTE. I can't recall for sure but I think my
first time was LOlita in the late fifties. I recall buying my father a birthday
_Pnin_ since Pnin reminded me of my first Russian teacher--a volume I later
inherited. My father always wrote the date at the end of any book he read,
so that was December 1957. The third was _Invitation to a Beaheading_
which, after LOLITA, I found disappointing although, many years later, I found
it to be technically far more glittering than LO.
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