A Change of Plans

I didn't want to do this. You had been through enough, really, what with all the dithering about the ancient art of poetry. Stick to the book club! you said. These strictures were imposed to curtail just this sort of Wordsworth fawning! you said. What was the book we were reading again! you said. Well, guilty on all counts. But there are changes further.

I am now about a fifth of the way through Author Author and, like its main character, it's been a little thin up top. Hopefully, it will remain true to its mimeomorphism and be a little substantial around the middle as well. However, until then, a few events have conspired to lead me, for the first time in this book club's storied history, to table the current selection and install a new one in its place.

This was not a decision taken lightly. The New Pick was first suggested by the namesake of this guy, who is not to be screwed with. "Author Author?" he said. "I thought we were doing Pnin!" So he did think, and so he did threaten to make his family-friendly community into a second Avignon. To avoid this, and because my good friend and thesis advisor Prof. Fix suggested that there is more to Nabokov's Pnin than my description of it as "kind of a one-off" hinted at, we shall make it the fourth official selection of the Unpacking My Library book club. Now, since I have read Pnin before -- briefly, and not in the best of places -- I may have to hang some fire and post here on whatever else I am reading incidentally. So, catch up quickly, and democracy will return. And don't worry! Henry James will be back at some point. There is, after all, only so much democracy to go around here.