Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions
The book I read for the 2021 NONFICTION READER CHALLENGE in the category Essay Collection is Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions , by Martin Amis, 1993. I’ve never been interested in essay collections. Maybe I had to write too many essays throughout school and university. But any time I read a review of an essay collection that sounds interesting, I check it out in a bookstore and put it down again. So to find a book for the ‘essay collection’ category of this Reader Challenge, I decided to browse the essay shelf in the library. First the title caught my eye, and then the first sentence of the blurb on the back: “Fuelled by innumerable cigarettes, Martin Amis provides dazzling portraits of contemporaries and mentors alike: …” then follows a list of the people mentioned in the separate chapters. I was familiar with the author’s name, but had never read anything he wrote. Conversations with different people (of different levels of interest for me) sounded like something I cou...