Subway Reads

How I escaped the jaws of adolescence without reading Lolita, I'll never be quite sure. It is, after all, one of those books that defiant teenage ne'er-do-wells insist on reading, evocatively, in public. I suppose it's at this point that I should mention I never was much of a hell raiser, despite a penchant for obviously inappropriate boyfriends.

So it was with great pleasure this week that I realized, Nabokov is hilarious. I mean, miss-your-subway-stop, chuckle-oddly-to-yourself-on-the-train hilarious. A gentle professor named Timofey Pnin impelled this realization as I devoured the short novel that bears his name. Easily readable, but jammed full of twists and turns of linguistic information, Pnin makes you want to read aloud, just so the crunch of the syllables last a bit longer. Definitely worth checking out whether you're a fan of Nabokov already or, like me, have been missing out all these years. And with this one, you won't have to worry about sly glances from teenage schoolgirls.

Below, the top five on the F train:

Lifeguard
by James Patterson and Andrew Gross

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia
by Elizabeth Gilbert

The Places In Between
by Rory Stewart

Shalimar the Clown: A Novel
by Salmon Rushdie

The First Lady
by Carl Weber