There were actually quite a few passages that caught my attention in Good Readers, Good Writers. One passage that particularly stuck out at me was one of the questions Nabokov brought up, can we really learn about history from these novels? No. The part of the paragraph that really stuck out at me was this, "Cane we rely on Jane Austen's picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman's parlor?" (Nabokov 1) This really stuck out at me, because in my previous blogs, I said that we could learn about the older days from these books, but now I don't really know if we can trust what goes on in these novels.
Another passage that stuck out at me was when Nabokov talks about being a reader. He says that we can not really read a book, that we can only reread it. He says that the first time we read the book, we only read the print, which isn't really reading. We don't paint the picture the author is trying to get us to imagine the first time we read. Nabokov says, "In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details." (Nabokov 2) I totally agree with this statement. I read The Picture of Dorian Gray for the first time this summer and I found it immensly dull, probably because I couldn't see what was happening. I didn't have the proper picture.
Nabokov, Vladimir. "Good Readers and Good Writers." Lecture
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