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Originally Posted by chairman of the bored
NWRA: I'm finishing off In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower right now, keeping on track with my one Proust book per year till I'm done.
After that maybe some Henry Miller. It's almost synonymous with Summer for me at this point.
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That's my favourite of them, I think, specifically the Balbac section, and the descriptions of the girls. That or the Swann In Love mini-story, for its descriptions of 'the little phase' in the music, Swann's love which is near madness (uncomfortably intense at points) and the great bathos at the end. I could read it again, now.
I think I managed one Proust book every six months (and for a lot of that time, I was unemployed, so I had an advantage haha). Not only is it very long, its so dense that I kept on needing to re-read pages as I went along - either to admire the brilliant descriptive writing, muse on one of his observations or philosophical points or to keep track of what he's talking about at times (got lost during a tangent about art or music - albeit an interesting one - then when he returns to the subject of four-pages ago!). And what's more: reading the entire thing again is so rewarding as you are probably already noticing that there are loads of allusions to future events in the beginning of the book, and so much of it rests on people changing throughout time in surprising ways (or the narrator’s perspective of them changing). Yeah... it's my favourite book.