Yesterday afternoon I found myself in that peculiarly liminal space between the end of one book and the beginning of another. I am usually careful to set up my next read well in advance, however, on this particular occasion, I’d hit a dead end. There are more books on the shelf in the living room than there is time for me to read even half of them, but I still couldn’t settle on what to tackle next. As such, I engaged in that always unproductive and frustrating activity of pulling out a random book, scanning a few pages, growing quickly dissatisfied and then swapping it for another; repeating the act at least a dozen turns over and always to no honest success. One such probing returned VN (Andrew Field, 1986), a hefty biography on the much famed Russian-American novelist, critic, lecturer and entomologist, Vladimir Nabokov, that I know I bought second-hand last year, but cannot recall the venue of the purchase nor the surrounding season. A casual survey through the book’s yellow aged pages revealed this gem of a quote that I believe worthy of note:

The line originates from a set of instructions Nabokov delivered to his students before an exam during his time teaching at Cornell University and is a fine example of the writer’s wit as well as his knack for phrase turning. I have to admit, the hook had taken ahold of something within me, and I was definitely being pulled in a particular direction. Ultimately, I chose not to pursue Field’s biography, but was instead inspired to pull down The Luzhin Defence (1930) by the man himself. In the end, I got to where I needed to go and learned a little something along the way. Not a bad result by any account, but it sure took a fair amount of aimless wandering to get there and I made one hell of a mess of the bookshelf in the process.  

This isn’t the most riveting of recollections, I admit, but it is the truth of what happened. Hopefully, there is at least the slightest flash of an insight into the mechanics of everyday life contained within it from which we can all profit. Even if in only the most trivial sense of the word. If not, then I apologise for wasting your time. But I did try. 

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