I mention chess to underline that he liked puzzles. His obsession with puns is the most famous aspect of nabkov’s style: (“If you’re a fan of word play, you probably already know how much fun Nabokov had penning Lolita. There’s hardly a page in the novel that doesn’t make good use of a pun,”)

“Nabokov’s Lolita abounds with puns and ambiguity. The author uses different types of this stylistic device: his writing includes allusions from Classical and Renaissance categories to contemporary humorous play on words[1]. According to Lokrantz, Nabokov’s puns can be divided into five categories…

Thematic - puns used to highlight a theme from the book. EXAMPLE: the author uses many levels of meaning when playing with Lolita’s name. He employs many plays on her Christian name - Dolores, her nicknames - Lolita, Lo, Dolly, and her surname - Haze: doleful days in dumps and dolors[4] my dolorous and hazy darling[5] Explanation: Doleful, dolorous and dolors are plays on the name Dolores and all of them are related to pain and suffering. Lolita’s name was not chosen by Nabokov accidentally; it indicates the girl’s sorrow from the very beginning of the novel.”

https://en.m.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Vladimir_Nabokov's_Lolita/Puns

1. it is also about what america in the 1950s looked like from an immigrant’s perspective. nabokov is a russian emigre writing in his second language. (his brother was killed in the holocaust.) the roughed up tomboy always petulantly demanding nickels is very American. the neighbors are stuck up, the stepford wives style suburbs hideous and cloying and sterile and false.

2. it is about language and wordplay. nabokov loved chess. for example dolores haze is a fake name and a wordplay on “dolorous,” meaning sweet and sad. nabokov’s outsider perspective on English made him love little jokes like that. focusing solely on plot misses so much of what makes the book a masterpiece. nabokov is primarily a trickster who thought of books as clever mechanical toys.

3. it’s a pretty good mystery! there are two pedophiles, not one. the playwright Clare Quilty appears constantly, in tiny ways. most readers totally miss it. the book is much much better on a second read, alert to things like that.

i have a row of big collections on my shelf and will occasionally pick one at random and leaf through it til i’m bored. it’s like scrolling on a phone in terms of shutting my brain off an reading some sad or pretty lines. that sounds lazy but i think is a more peaceful less intellectual experience that lets me sit with the poem in a natural way.