It doesn’t have to be good the first time, you just have to be smart enough to incrementally make it less bad with each pass.

Within the communities of adults who still read a lot of YA (and the most YA-adjacent SFF) there is a pretty strong insistence that YA is no different than any other kind of fiction - gotta wonder what the appeal to them is if that’s the case - and, if you dig at all, a real defensiveness about being judged for still reading a kind of books that some people think of as a deliberately adolescent style they ought to have outgrown. Neither of those things incline anyone involved to identify this stuff in their recommendations.

Within the communities of adults who still read a lot of YA (and the most YA-adjacent SFF) there is a pretty strong insistence that YA is no different than any other kind of fiction - gotta wonder what the appeal to them is if that’s the case - and, if you dig at all, a real defensiveness about being judged for still reading a kind of books that some people think of as a deliberately adolescent style they ought to have outgrown. Neither of those things incline anyone involved to identify this stuff in their recommendations.

It sounds like you got the point of the book and found it to be a compelling read that gave you things to think about, which is what you’re supposed to get out of a book like that. If Nabokov was trying to write a book where the protagonist wasn’t a monster, where we were supposed to uncomplicatedly like and be charmed by the writer, that isn’t the book he would have written. Instead, you met the book on its own terms and got something out of it.