From what I’ve gleaned from Nabokov interviews and the one book I read by him, Lolita, as lyrical a writer he is there’s also something cold and insular about his writing, like he’s afraid of his work being taken to mean anything outside itself, if that makes any sense. It’s almost like he’s a mathematician, or a fabulist whose only interest is creating aesthetically pleasing worlds without any relation to ours. It’s my theory at least for why he wrote Lolita from such a warped perspective as the narrator’s, to distance the audience from accepting any point made by the narrator as true. Not that literature could ever be totally insular, since it’s always communicating something, but Nabokov seemed to warp that communication as much as possible, without adopting any of the conspicuous tactics of his postmodernist peers. I’m willing to read more books by him as well as secondary literature and see how this theory holds, but if it or something more refined than it bears out, I’ll feel my aloofness towards him is justified
A volume of Plato’s complete works published by Hatchett. It’s not that Plato is especially difficult to understand, sentence by sentence (though he definitely can be — eg Sophist, Parmenides, and parts of Timaeus). It’s that he is so discursive it can be hard to connect all the different points he raises. Plus, he also wrote a lot, and some of his dialogues are just really dry (eg Cratylus and Laws).