A reading list following a thread beginning really with Vladimir Nabokov, but also with Leo Tolstoy, and Italo Calvino, and from Calvino an interest in fables.

"I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall."

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

I say here I'm following a thread, but "we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until a given time, is closed; but air comes in through the cracks."

- Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift