Lolita

Nabokov's "Lolita" is one of my favourite books - it's ultimately a tragic love story, heartrendingly beautiful and awfully well-written. Yes, you're right - it's also perverted. Yet that's the key to its genius - it still manages to be incredibly finely balanced: dark enough not to be saccharine, beautiful enough not to be hopeless, right enough not to be wrong, wrong enough not to be right. One of those things that are balanced so much, the gold dust falls off.

"What did the world weigh? It weighs, but is not weighed. Sometimes its scales are crooked. It weighs life and labour in the balance against silver and gold. That'll never balance. But fast and ruthless, it keeps on weighing. It spills alot of life that way, and sometimes a little gold."

- Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz