Your Literary Fave is Problematic: Humbert Humbert and Nabokov’s Lolita

After thinking hard about the idea that “books belong to their readers”, I can easily come up with five different examples of how this can end up being horribly disastrous. People can interpret books however they want, but when a harmful interpretation that normalizes violence, sexism, or whatever your favorite Problematic-ism is, gets perpetuated across entire generations as something good or even begins to be unapologetically romanticized—that’s when you’ve got a problem on your hands. From that train of thought and my own tendency to get, as I’ve been told, “way too serious” about books, springs the first episode of what I’ve titled Your Literary Fave Is Problematic.