So, I've finished Lolita and discussed my thoughts on the book as a whole regarding its meaning and my takeaways. However, I still haven't given my conclusive opinion. Was it worth the read?
To give you some background, I had one major goal for myself going into AP Literature and Composition: to read as many types of books as possible. Whether it was on my own time or not, I wanted to cover all of the bases. I figure the more topics I cover, the more likely I am to avoid being floored by a Question 3 prompt that has nothing to do with any of the books I've read this year. But, despite my attempts to collect all of the classics, I have maybe only read three—Lolita being one of them.
Even still, between those three and the ones in class, I have covered a fairly broad range of topics: race, coming-of-age, freedom, the use of religion, gender, society, etc. This is one of the reasons I chose Lolita out of the stack for this assignment—it brings something new to the table.
If given a question about guilt, criminality, first-person narration, murder, manipulation, love, or by some miracle, pedophilia, Lolita has me covered. I've been pretty repetitive in my discussion of how unique of a novel it is throughout my blog posts, and I stand by it. No other novel that I can think of has a plot like Lolita's or is written in quite the same brilliant way.
Which leads me to my next point—it's a memorable novel. Unlike The Catcher in the Rye, which I read on a whim and barely remember (I just had to Google the name of it to check if there was a "the" in the title), I feel as though I couldn't possibly forget this story. In general, twisted tales stick with you.
With that being said, the disturbing subject matter could very well be grounds for this book not being taught in an AP class. For an assignment like this, I think it works extremely well. The kids who are interested have the opportunity to read it as their homework instead of in addition to it, while the kids who don't aren't obligated to. The length of the novel meant that the pace was reasonable but not wasteful of our time this year. Plus, since this work is all done out of class and not in it, we are able to read Macbeth at the same time.
I personally think this was a really great book to read for this course in particular. It was definitely of merit, it had countless layers to it, and it’s the kind of book where I would read it again and find all kinds of new details and connections that I missed this time around. Though I maybe wouldn’t recommend it for classes across the country, I think our class this year would’ve done a nice job discussing the book even if we had read it in class.
With that, thank you for reading my blog posts if you’ve been keeping up, and I encourage you to pick Lolita up if you haven’t already.
