Finished the second volume of Boyd's Nabokov and am now beginning the first. I am reading them in their order of acquisition. Also, picked up at the library a biography of Véra Nabokov. I see where my friend Dean picked up his teaching style -- I had always assumed from Socrates. Some questions from VN: "Name King Lear's three dogs" or "What was the design on Anna Karenina's bedroom wall?" His assumption was that he could never make critics of most of his students, but he could at least make them close readers. Two other nabokovian traits that Dean shares (or acquired): color synaesthesia and entomology. Oh well, they also look similar, too. I think Dean may have read too many 19th century Russian novels in his formative period. Or, I may not have read enough. Not from lack of trying. The latest was my final, incomplete assault on The Idiot during why humid fortnight in Tamilnadu. Come to think of it, Crime and Punishment is the only one I've ever completed, and I needed to be sick, sick, sick and out of sorts in Kathmandu. I also read Ada during that illness. The third book of my Nepalese dysentary trilogy was The Great Railway Bazaar. I picked those books up (and still have them) in that strange hotel on Freak St called the Blue Angel. Out of a closetfull of books. The rules were simple: leave one book for each one you take. I don't remember the books I left, but I think two of them were Portnoy's Complaint and All the President's Men, picked up in New Delhi.