I think I've said this before : Pale Fire is the book to read to understand what a book can achieve. I'm 2/3rds through it, and I can already see ideas, narrative tricks, deliberate holes in the plot, and any number of other devices that are going to leave me totally depressed because I'll never produce anything approaching it :(. More so, when I can see the evidence in so many other books of writers struggling to put in just one of the dozens of ideas from this book.

Maybe its blasphemy, but I think Pale Fire does a better of of experimenting with style and yet delivering the story, than Ulysses. Or maybe it's because of Nabokov's amazing style, he moves between straight descriptive text to flowery, stylish phrases so effortlessly, its a joy to just read any page of his work. This from a person for whom English was a learned language. Nabokov is my hero!!!