Splinters

Last week on In Writing I explained why I believed I have an urge to reduce my collection of books. One of the pile to be doe-nated to Oxfam is Nabokov's Collected Stories, mainly because it is an unwieldy hardback. I prefer wieldy books.

Today, I re-read one of the few stories to stand out when I read it eight years ago: Signs & Symbols. A few sentences ran shivers through me, more than what Nabokov himself called "aesthetic bliss". It was enough to make me accept passing the book on.