"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure of the windowpane." Pale Fire really is a joyous tour de force, and it prefigured much of modern lite

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure of the windowpane." Pale Fire really is a joyous tour de force, and it prefigured much of modern literature -- DFW's endless use of footnotes has its source in Nabakov's loopily self-referential novel, and it's probably, despite its idiosyncratic form, the best book to start with if you haven't read Nabakov before. (Ada: Or Ardour is a great follow-on, feeling like a denser and more literary Phillip K Dick.) And when you read Nabakov's luminous prose, remember that English was his third language, and he wrote equally brilliantly in German and his native Russian.