After discovering the coolest site on the internet, I decided to go back and reread Ada (with the assistance of those notes), and I’m glad I did. Nabokov’s masterpiece (and longest work), Ada, or Ardor tells the story of Van Veen and his sister Ada and their decades-long incestuous love affair (what’s Nabokov without some sort of taboo love?). Set on Terra, an alternate world that is both similar to and strikingly different from ours, Ada is a meditation on the nature of love, the meaning of memory, and the passage of time. Written in some of Nabokov’s most ecstatic and thrilling prose, Ada manages to be tender, shocking, deliriously poetic, and philosophical. It’s the rare difficult read that you just can’t put down.