Now, this is one book that I might have some reservations about recommending in Verde, simply because I could receive irate letters from parents accusing me of corrupting their children with perverted smut.

This is absolutely untrue; Lolita is not smut, and I am not a pervert. Nor are you a pervert if you choose to read it, but an intelligent, astute person with excellent taste in literature. (Unless you are one of those creepy people who want to pick up Lolita because you are titillated by the story of a middle-aged man who lusts after preadolescent girls, in which case the joke will almost definitely be on you: there is not a single graphic sex scene in the entire novel, not even any four-letter words, and Nabokov's dense and brilliant writing style would scare you off by page two.)

Here's an interesting fact that should illustrate my point about those irate parents: I was unable to use Google to look up a particular fact about Lolita's background because the SafeSearch on the iMacs in the Verde computer lab filtered out the word "lolita" from the search.

The source of the controversy surrounding Lolita is exactly what I mentioned earlier: Humbert Humbert, our narrator and protagonist is a man with a consuming and repressed desire for sexually precocious preadolescent girls, whom he terms "nymphets".

Obviously, his twisted desire is a little more complex than that: It is deeply rooted in a tragic death that destroyed his lifewhen he was 13. Humbert never loses his conviction that he and his Annabel were as perfectly destined for each other as any two people could be; within a few months of their first meeting in the French Riviera, she has died of typhus, an emotional wound from which he will never be able to recover.

H.H. has spent much of his adult life secretly struggling with his forbidden desires, looking for the reincarnation of his Annabel, until he meets Dolores Haze, the 12-year-old daughter of a middle-class suburban woman in New England.

For Humbert, it is love at first sight. For both of them, it is the beginning of a tragic, passionate downward spiral made all the more brilliant by Nabokov's writing style. I'm not going to give away anything here, because I want everyone to be able to enjoy Lolita for themselves.

Just a warning: Nabokov has a proclivity for using big words, and one that is especially remarkable for an author who writes in English as a third language. In fact, Nabokov uses the English language better than almost every native speaking author. So if you are baffled by words like 'solipsism,' 'paroxysm,' or 'redolent', don't let that discourage you. I'm not ashamed to admit that when I first read Lolita at age 13, I had to refer to a dictionary at least once per page. Lolita is anything but beach reading, but if you're a match for Nabokov's prose, it is one of the greatest novels ever published in English.