Last week, on a road trip, I thought, “I am turning 43 on Monday and I have never read Proust” So I Googled “which Proust to start with” and the internet told me that Swann in Love is the place to start.  This novella can stand alone, but it is actually a section of Swann’s Way, which in turn is the first volume of Proust’s famous In Search of Lost Time. The plot is pretty straightforward: Swann, a high society bougie fellow in fin-de-siecle Paris, […]

About a year ago, I read and reviewed Swann’s Way, which is the first volume of Proust’s (in)famous Remembrance of Things Past. In the first book, the narrator is a young boy, trying to make sense of the world of adults. Surprisingly, a lot of that book is about Swann, an adult socialite a neighbor of the narrator’s family. Swann makes some rather unorthodox choices in his love life, and the narrator’s family feels the ripples of those choice. Within a Budding Grove is the […]

All the way back in the ancient days of 2016, I read de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life. That put famed author Marcel Proust on my radar. Last year I read about Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) reading Proust when recovering from a traumatic open heart surgery, and how Proust reconnected him to his love of reading. After that, I finally took the plunge! I spent four months reading through the 600+ pages of Swann’s Way, volume one (of six) of Proust’s In Search […]

Book two in Proust and like the first book for me, this is an audiobook listened to over Winter Break mostly while I did yardwork and played video games. I imagine if I told Proust this he would say: “Why are you speaking in English?” “What’s with your weird clothes” “What’s video games?” Anyway, we are older now and love is in the air. Specifically the love of a young girl? Maybe? There were a lot of familiar thoughts happening in this book for me. […]