LIT CRIT: Proust

I try every year to read all of "Pepys Diary." I can't seem to get past the first few months of Volume 1. I've had the entire set since about 2000.

The novels themselves don't bother me, my impulse control for picking up novels at used bookstores swearing I'm going to read them but piling up like excess bric-a-brac bothers me. I may resort to packing a novel in a deep pocket or reusable shopping bag for supermarket checkout lines.

Neal Stephenson's [italic]Cryptonomicon[/italic] I'm about 200 pages in and stalled. I keep meaning to read all the way through Vikram Seth's [italic]A Suitable Boy[/italic] but don't get further than two workers getting killed after going to vote.

Roberto Bolano's 2666. I've started it four times but have never finished it. It's not boring or bad, in fact it's great. It's just very very long. I love his other work. I've read THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES many times.

a postscript: my husband wants me to read [italic]Moby-Dick[/italic]. I'm not sure I have time for that. I used to think I had time to read the works in Clifton Fadiman's "Lifetime Reading Plan" but I'd rather enjoy the rest of my days. I feel I fulfilled my Melville requirement with [italic]Bartleby the Scrivener[/italic].

Art should be enjoyed, not endured.

"Naked Lunch". Repeats and repeats and repeats. Can't get past the first 100 pages.

Any novel by Samuel Beckett.

r2, I'm a voracious reader and have enjoyed many classics and tougher reads and I also attempted A Suitable Boy. I actually loved it but the sheer weight of carrying that paperback around with me did me in. I also saw the hundreds of pages still ahead of me and realized I wouldn't be moving on to another book for a couple of months. And then there was the issue of Indian politics. Overwhelming! It's funny but I got to exactly the same place in the book you did.

[quote]I actually loved it but the sheer weight of carrying that paperback around with me did me in

The Kindle was invented for books like this. It makes reading huge novels a joy (assuming the huge novel is any good).

"War and Peace" is sitting on my shelf saying, "Why haven't you read me" at this very minute.

Thanks, r9. I knew someone would pop up here and suggest a Kindle to me.

I'm afraid I'm just one of those old-fashioned people who enjoys the pleasure of holding a real book and turning pages. I especially love a well-produced paperback edition.

I’ve been starting & then stalling & then restarting both “Infinite Jest” & “Look Homeward Angel” for years.

Proust is great but the parts that were published after he died, that he didn't have a chance to rewrite and expand into something unreadable, were better.

Stop. It is a total waste of time. Postmodernist bullshit that has corrupted literary assessment for over half a century.

R2

Cryptonomicon Is an incredibly prescient novel. You should give it a chance again. I just re-read it two years ago and it not only holds up, but is more relevant than when it was published.

R10

War and peace is a masterpiece. It took me a long time to read it, but it is still a masterful treatise. Men are men, and cycles shall always repeat.

R12

Infinite Jest is probably one of the greatest American novels of the modern age. His book on the origins of zero is one of my favorite math books. When DFW committed suicide I wasn’t shocked, but my heart broke.

LOL R13

Isn’t one of his sentences the single longest sentence in the entire corpus of English literature?

r14 Greatest novel in history, but yes; r16 oh my.

How does one get past all that French in the opening chapter of War and Peace?

My greatest reading pleasures of the past few years have been reading David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Bleak House. Dickens' attitudes towards the morality of human nature were not something I could have grasped or appreciated in my younger years.

The only reason to read is for pleasure. Proust is great because he is so funny and insightful.

Once you get past the Overture, In Search of Lost Time is a really fun read. The narrator's constant incomprehension of homosexuality and the inability of anyone to be satisfied with anything they get is the stuff of farce.

Do not know about Moby Dick. That seems less fun than Proust.

I am reading a book called Herman Melville written by Lewis Mumford. I am on page 100 and don't know how to proceed as I have not read any Melville . I might make a stab at some of his work and then go back to current book as a primer. The 1st part of Mumford's book introduces me to Melville as a person, which has been interesting , but then starts to dissect each of his works in chronological order, so it has become a slog.

I still need to read Zola and Balzac. I agree that "War & Peace" is wonderful, and I found the perfect way to read it. I was in "Fiddler on the Roof," and had to sit for ten minutes at a table in the bar scene ("L'Chaim"). I read twenty pages of the novel every performance, and finished the book in a year and a half. In tiny chunks, it made perfect sense, I became so enthralled I sometimes missed my cue.

Have repeatedly tried to read The Faerie Queen since HS, never get past Book 1.

R19

Your head must be stuck so far up your ass that you can’t see daylight.

His daughter Juliet was a great dancer.

[quote]Isn’t one of his sentences the single longest sentence in the entire corpus of English literature?

Given he wrote in French, I expect not.

[quote]How does one get past all that French in the opening chapter of War and Peace?

Most versions either translate the French into English, or provide a translation in the notes.

Moby Dick is probably my favorite novel in the world, so maybe I'm a bad example. Took me 3 tries to get all the through War & Peace, but I did. I think Anna Karenina is a better novel. I have read Proust straight through and am thinking of doing it again. I liked Inifinite Jest but I actually think DFW's essays are better than his novels.

I have failed to read Pynchon. Got to the scat scene in Gravity's Rainbow and said "no mas".

UGG. Post modernism has destroyed literary criticism. The modern novel is pure navel gazing

Proust is not postmodern. Stop.

USA Trilogy.

First novel, great. Second, begins to peter out. Never got to the third, and this after several tries.

What is meant by postmodernism?

Postmodernism is difficult to define, because to define it would violate the postmodernist’s premise that no definite terms, boundaries, or absolute truths exist.

Are nationalism, politics, religion, and war the result of a primitive human mentality? Is truth an illusion? How can Christianity claim primacy or dictate morals? The list of concerns goes on and on….

It seems both an infinite number of realities and no realities – all at the same time. No wonder it is difficult to define.

Post modernism is anti-human.

[quote]How does one get past all that French in the opening chapter of War and Peace?

[quote]Most versions either translate the French into English, or provide a translation in the notes.

That's where a Kindle or EPUB version really shines. In the version I read, the French text appeared as written, but each block of French had a link to the specific endnote where a translation appeared. At the end of each translated block, another link returned to where you were reading. What a lot of page flipping that saved!

r21 I didn't think I'd make it through the hefty [italic]Pickwick Papers[/italic], but it was a funny and smooth read and I could finish it before my library copy was due.

Currently I am reading “The Sins of Jack Saul” the notorious Victorian male hustler who figured in the Cleveland Street Affair. I am troubled by the lack of documentation (footnotes) and some of the imagining about how Jack felt. I need to know where Mr. Chandler is getting his insights from and the limited end notes do not suffice.

Has anyone read the literary thriller (a truly apt description) All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage?

Just finished it. It was one of the best new novels I've read in years, beautifully told story of a young wife found axed to death in her upstate NY farm house and all of her family and friends that might have a reason to kill her. Couldn't put it down for the first 300 or so pages and then it took several wrong turns and never recovered. So disappointing!

Where was the editor? Where were her friends who read it in drafts??

Loving this thread, the "What have you been reading?" threads are so rare on DL these days; hope no one minds that I've mentioned a more recent book!

I removed almost all books from my home, except cookbooks with one sentimental value. I have.a PhD and luckily no need to publish nor impress anyone with deep reading. Almost all my ambitions to be well read in English French and German fell away before my mid-30s, 20 years ago. The Internet was a game changer for about 15 years but now I feel similar about the knowledge I was building through the net as I once felt about literature. I find myself increasingly drawn to expanding my breadth in music, which I thoroughly enjoy.

I've tried Gravity's Rainbow three times. Ran out of steam around pp 150 each time. I have read both War and Peace and Anna Karenina. I haven't read Proust yet. Read part of Moby Dick in High School and have no interest in going back to it.

I'm astonished that some of you actually got through Gravity's Rainbow. After Finnegans Wake and the Golden Bowl, I found it the hardest novel to get through. Ulysses is easier.

Something I've promised myself to read all the way through one day is Dorothy Dunnett's six (or seven?) volume House of Niccolo epic. I had to keep putting it down to do research reading, and then I have to start again. She's such a marvelous writer. Was, I mean.

Doris Lessing's THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK is another that I've always *almost* started but have never taken the full dive.

I'm soliciting support buddies in 2018 for getting through at least one of these. Maybe host a Silent Reading Party where introverts are saved from small talk and the price of admission is a hefty literary novel, cookies (or madeleines!) and tea or spiked coffee.

Though I got through Middlemarch, and even sort of enjoyed it, I couldn't finish The Mill on the Floss or Daniel Deronda. I sort of regret not finishing Daniel Deronda.

R43 I was impressed with the TV 'Deronda'. The director tactfully handled all the unpleasantnesses.

[r40] I adore Dorothy Dunnett and have read the Lymond Chronicles four times and am on my second way through the House of Niccolo. Pity she is so little known as it's the best historical fiction ever written.

^ Dear Dorothy, this thread if for LITERATURE, not pulp fiction!

I love Proust - the thing with him is to allow yourself to skim through a couple of pages quickly if you start to get bored. (My interest started flagging every time Albertine showed up - everything about her is boring and unconvincing.) There's always something amazing coming up, and what seems boring at first is less boring as you go along.

It's not like you're going to have to take a test afterward. There's no shame in stopping a book if you're not enjoying it, no matter how good it's supposed to be. (And honestly, reading a book like Finnegans Wake all the way through is ridiculous - only pretentious people do that so they can boast about it afterward.)

On the other hand, if NOBODY is able to get all the way through a book (which seems to be the case with Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow) then it's probably not really all that good.

I just started Balzac's Lost Illusions. Les Miserables has been staring at me from the bookshelf for years, and I've only read a few pages of it. I was going to try to read it in French to improve my reading comprehension in the language, but so far it's not getting read in any language.

Maybe if I start Les Miserables right after Lost Illusion it will get read. I'm trying to have three books going at once from different categories in case I get bored with one I can switch. So there's the classic Lost Illusion, the contemporary Final Girls which has such a ridiculous description "hammocks between my fingers," I put it down and haven't picked it back up again, and Chroniques de Los Angeles which is also contemporary, but falls into the improving second language category.

Pere Gorriot is fantastic. You have to slog through the dull first 30 pages or so. After that it is great---with the first appearance of Balzac's great gay character Vautrin!

MOBY DICK is fantastic. ("It's about this... whale.") There are numerous narrative passages so lavish that they sweep the reader up in a wonderful delirium. There are also a substantial number of chapters that are ruminations on parts of the great leviathan about which you have probably never ruminated before. MOBY DICK and Bartleby the Scrivener are two of my favorite works by Melville. I'm afraid that Benjamin Britten's opera BILLY BUDD has displaced Melville's original, not that I have any complaints about the original. TYPEE and OMOO were interesting, in their own ways, but after that, it was time to move on.

I'm stuck now half way through BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT was a thrilling read. I was ready for more Dostoyevsky. But while I am impressed on every page just how worthy a book is BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, it is a tough slog. It took Dostoyevsky two years to write, but it is taking me longer to read it. Its fluid structure is daunting.

I agree that "Brothers Karamazov" and "Crime and Punishment" are two incredible novels. "Crime and Punishment" is a fairly quick read compared to some of the long novels mentioned above. For me Joyce's "Ulysses" has been an almost impossible read. I took a seminar on the novel while in Graduate School but....never again. "2666" is one of my favorite novels in the last 10 years. Long, but you can skim most of part IV (The one about the crimes).

R47 I agree about the Albertine passages in Proust. Fortunately all the other characters engage me - particularly Francoise, Baron de Charlus and those nasty Verdurins. R49 Les Miserables is well worth another go. I even read Hugo's long commentaries about cloistered nuns, Waterloo, King Louis Philippe, the Paris sewer system etc. I enjoyed Marius' back story which has been edited out of Les Miz (by necessity of course).

Ivanhoe, or anything Sir Walter Scott. I appreciate his attention to detail but man, he cannot get a story developing or even moving at a good clip to keep a reader’s interest. I don’t remember where I got to.

Like someone upthread I struggled with The Faerie Queene, even after trying an audiobook. I haven't ever finished and don’t enjoy Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales either, despite knowing the English. There, I said it.

Proust is even more boring in English than in French.

Isak Dinesen's Winter's Tales. I slog through one story, put it aside for a year or 10, pick it up again, read another story, then put it aside again. If I don't finish it before I die, I've got a notation in my Will to be buried with a copy so that I can take it up again when I reach the World to Come.

‘Vanity Fair’. I put it down as soon as picked it up. Much heavy literature of the period is almost impossible for a reader of now to digest, so accustomed as we are culturally to receiving everything piecemeal.

How in the world is Proust post modern? I suppose one can make an argument to support any applying any adjective to anything but labeling Proust as post modern is not conventional and seems ignorant.

Hold on. Vanity Fair was great!!! I laughed and I cried. Come on. Go Becky!

We live in an age so visual it is almost post-literate.

Brothers Karamazov, Infinite Jest and The Tin Drum have all defeated me repeatedly.

Also have never seen or read Othello.

I'm thinking of creating a group where people make book goals for the year. And can discuss things. I'd love to get through Moby-Dick and David Copperfield. And I need to read A Light in August as well.

Oh, and Les Miserables stares at me from my bookshelf, practically untouched. But after reading Notre-Dame de Paris in French, I'm not sure I have the brain energy.

Honesty as pathetic as it sounds one of the proudest moments of my life was finishing Joyce’s Ulysses after two failed attempts and it ultimately talking upwards of 6 months-plus chiefly because of my anally retentive inability to not just simply ignore the cornicopia or gallimaufry of strange and unfamiliar words including Joycean neologisms as well as medieval Scholasticism philosophical concepts along with of course the more familiar Aristotelian and Platonism and les familiar neo-Platonism as well as the myriad Latin and Greek words and phrases typically culled from the aforementioned rmythologies which were strikingly set alomgside and compared to Celtic myth and of course crucially Joyce’s own contemporary Dublin doings and goings-on and more to the point bring set on one particular day in said fair city and famously climaxing in massive unbroken stream-of-consciousness sentences or the Penelope sequence better known as Molly’s soliloquy which is simply stunning in it’s assonance and alliteration and overall poetic force which can also be said of the work as a whole and furthermore would fully justify its reputation as THE masterwork of Modernism but could equally be claimed as a Postmodernist classic but what is not in dispute is that it is a masterpiece and hence why it took my version without footnotes so long to read concurrently alongside numerous reference books both ancient and modern as well as specialist dictionaries and encyclopaedia on Greek and Roman and Celtic mythology along with tomes on philosophy and comparative religion and art and music and poetry and of course Irish as well as world history and all of which greatly enriched my soul and irrevocably changed me immensely or so I thought at the time but subsequently truth be told it hasn’t had any kind of listing influence over me at all and I’m most proud is not in fact that I finished it but rather that I never ever have to read it again!

David Copperfield is an easy read. Most Dickens is because his prose is so lush and astute and he is an amazing storyteller. Moby Dick is an absolute slog. So is most of the post-modern canon.

Donna Tartt had a funny quote about what makes great literature, at least for her. Paraphrasing here, but great literature is the book you'd ask your mom to bring you if you were sick in the hospital. No one asks their mom to bring them Faulkner. Or Joyce. They'd ask for Dickens. Or Balzac. Or Turgenev.

I read Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamasov in my teens when I was an ambitious high school English student who was put on an independent study program. I also found Karamasov to be a bit of a slog in places. If I remember right there is a sermon that just goes on and on. The Idiot is another great Dostoyevsky read, at least as good as Crime and Punishment. In my teens and twenties if I loved an author I tended to be obsessive and would read everything that I could find. I went through Hesse, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Lagervist, Knut Hamsun and Yukio Mishima, among others. Now that I'm retired I should be reading more, but as others here have reported, I'm still buying and the books are piling up. I'm going to buy a new reading lamp so that I can read in my favorite chair (a Kennedy style rocker). Maybe that will make a difference.

[R63] here. I should have added. I've never read Proust. I meant to. I mean to. I've just never gotten there.

Bravo, R61. Hilarious. Did you crib that?

I just started The Brothers Karamazov on my Kindle. We'll see.

R65 Not copypasta. All shitty grammar and rudimentary spelling mistakes mine own. But true story: that one book gave me the equivalent of a university education I otherwise missed out on and turned me into somewhat of .an autodidact. Although in all honesty finishing it took closer to a year due to the fascinating and oftentimes infuriating arcane and byzantine epistemological rabbit holes it sent me down. Truly life changing (even though often a slog ). I would advise anyone attempting to tackle it to go with the footnotes edition (when I embarked on my odyssey I didn’t even know what they were). Also, thank you.

R61 did you get to Mishima’s ‘Thirst For Love’? I read it as a college freshman and it shocked me to my core, the most ugly & powerful examination of female jealousy I’d ever come across. It was compulsive reading and easy to get through, but I’ve never picked it up again because it is just too emotionally wracking & frightening.

At [R68]. I'm guessing that you meant your question for me since [R61] doesn't mention Mishima. I remember that Thirst For Love was available in a paperback edition at that time (early 70's) but after reading a synopsis I don't believe that I read it. I did read the novella The Sailor Who Fell..., Forbidden Colors, Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavillion. He may have been the first gay author I read in any depth. His characters tended to be intense, singular and simultaneously isolated from yet still integrated within the larger heterosexual society. Not long after reading him I began my own journey as a gay man. One lesson I may have learned from his character's mistakes was to proceed cautiously. He could certainly be intense.

Totally out of fashion (which means it’s probably.imminently set to make a return) I’d recommend Sartre’s The Road to Freedom trilogy. Several gay characters too and it’s fascinating how, Sartre being Sartre, attempts to phenomenologically (or something) inhabit their —invariably neurotic (hey blame Freud! )—consciousness. World War Two setting. Less up its own Left Bank Frenchified arse than you’d imagine and really quite readable. I think Someone said that the novelist Simone de Beauvoir was a better philosopher and the philosopher Sartre was a better novelist — If not I’m claiming it.

For me Hell is not “other people”, just the ponderously pretentious Gallic ones, but I liked these characters and particularly the pantomime-villain-y moustache-twirlingly self-loathingly deliciously evil-gay antihero Daniel who without doubt would be a DL’er

^Oh and all that was to say I still haven’t even gotten past the first chapter of Sartre’s most famous and supposedly best novel Nassau and it’s been on my shelf for 20years and it’s not even a big book — some books just give off a fucking leave me a.one vibe

Nausea *

R10 You should read it. Excellent book. R66 Good luck. Not an easy book but interesting. About Proust, took me months to read it but I liked it, sort of. Very interesting and the best parts are in the final books.

Fucking leave me alone vibe*

As said above, once you get past the long 200 pages intro and into Swan's Love, Proust is great. I've never managed Moby Dick which i found excruciatingly boring. Tried several late Henry James buy only managed the Wings of the Dove when I was much younger.

This year i found Wilkie Collins, read No Name and Armadale, both wonderful. Armadale is more flawed but it compensates from having one of the greatest female characters ever, Lydia Gwilt.

Am reading The Sparsholt Affair at the moment, anyone read it yet?

No, but for me anything by Hollinghurst is a must read. I'm waiting for the American edition.

Cherry Ames - Dude Ranch Nurse

r75 I just finished The Moonstone by ole Willkie! it was part of a smart little set of books at my mother's house. Printed in 1965 I'll better they hadn't been opened since then so I grabbed them and dragged them home

R75, Armadale is fantastic. Collins's last book, The Haunted Hotel, also features as a dark, smoldering heroine/anti-heroine.

I've read Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow. I've read almost all of Melville, and a lot of Dostoyevsky. But Henry James--he's heavy sledding. I read The Wings of the Dove and called it quits.

However, inspired by you, OP, I may try In Search of Lost Time.

R21, I just finished, at long last, A Tale of Two Cities.

What a story! And it helped me get a little "Sidney Carton" joke Mr Crawley made in Downton Abbey...!

I am quite happy to say I will never finish Proust (if I do occasionally want to dip into the endless reminiscences of a prissy, sexless homosexual only interested in pastries I can just pop in on Datalounge) , the Brothers Karamazov (Crime and Punishment is one of my favourite novels I am just not interested in the heavier religiosity in BK), Dr Zhivago (it was the endless patronymics what did for me) and, above all, Don Quixote. I love the Spanish but they really aren't funny.

Oops, not caffeine, nicotine.

Baron de Charlus is one of the the highlights for sure. As is his tenderness for his grandmother. Also and his obvious, secret love for his "best friend", whose name I can't remember right now...

I wish I had the fortitude to finish ANY Proust, but cannot make myself do it.

Joyce is also on the list of authors I cannot get through and wish I could.

I've read more Melville than I'd ever care to admit. Advice - read the shorts first like Billy Budd, The Confidence Man, Bartleby,and Benito Cereno first. For some odd reason, it helps to understand those long tedious chapters like The Whiteness of the Whale and all the other random digressions because they are the more fully worked out versions of what he's trying to say, so when you read them in Moby Dick, you can see where he's going and why - it helps.

"The Whiteness of the Whale" , "The Try-Works" and "Fr. Mapple's Sermon" I think are my favorite chapters of Moby.

I would finish Proust if I knew that it would change my life and make me happy, the portion that I have read suggests otherwise.

[quote]"The Whiteness of the Whale" , "The Try-Works" and "Fr. Mapple's Sermon" I think are my favorite chapters of Moby.

Oh, I don't deny they're excellent. But, for most readers, they are long digressions and filler which detract from the plot. That's why i suggested reading some of his other short works first.

It's easier to understand HOW those chapters fit into what Melville is trying to express because the shorter works allow a reader to get a complete "story" version of those chapters - one of the chapters is actually even an altered version of Billy Budd itself.

R81, we have the same taste.

Robert de Saint Loup was the friend I was thinking of. Proust was obviously in love with him.

MOBY DICK and IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME are on my list for next year. I plan to read one meaty classic a month.

Monty Python summarizes how I feel about Proust.

Gertrude Stein.

OP, if you're serious about Proust, buy Eric Karpeles' Paintings in Proust or get from the library. It's a lovely companion volume with reproductions all of the paintings mentioned in the work (200+) and gives you a nice counterpoint to the words. It's a visual reference book and fun to turn to when a painting is mentioned. I have friends who have read and reread Proust-- they tell me that the payoff comes in the last volume. I found that true at the end of Swann's Way. The last part is like being on acid, in the best kind of way. And yes, Proust is post-modern. Just like Joyce. They are of the same period, and really are not so very different. I'd toss Faulkner in there, to boot.

OP, I teach Proust at a liberal arts college. I suggest to my students they use keys and guides to help them (as I also do for [italic]Ulysses[/italic]--but for no other books I teach) the first time they get through it.

Two books I would hugely recommend in helping you along in the project:

(1) For the whole book sequence, Patrick Alexander's [italic]Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time: A Reader's Guide to The Remembrance of Things Past.[/italic] Great synopses of the plots and snapshot and lists of the characters.

(2) if you have trouble getting through the first book, I recommend the English translation of Stéphane Heuet's fine graphic novel version of [italic]Swann's Way.[/italic] He uses much of Proust's actual language.

OP's set up is so middle-brow.

I've found the secret to Proust is the translation. I don't read French so I had to rely on the turgid Scott-Moncrieff version until Viking commissioned a new translation in 2002. It is a joyful revelation. Lydia Davis' "Swann's Way" is enchanting and propels you into the rest of the novel. I can't recommend it enough. It's like binge-watching a really good tv series.

I tried to read Proust but one chapter seemed like one long slow description of 5 seconds in a mind of a man reminiscing about 5 minutes of his childhood-- if that makes any sense which it doesn't. It was a huge book that I left at the airport and I hope someone picked it up and read it and it uplifted their life.

Proust is good at describing psychological phenomena that I experience but wouldn't know how to put into words. His words are infused with a melancholy I find pleasing.

Try Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa", also known as one of the longest books in the English language. I made the grave mistake of choosing to write a seminar paper comparing it alongside Richardson's "Pamela" when I was in graduate school (mind you, "Pamela" is a few hundred pages, but "Clarissa" is literally 1500+). It's so fucking long that my professor eventually advised me to only read a few key sections. It also happens to be an epistolary novel, so it's extremely nuanced. I still have my unabridged copy from grad school, along with "The Rape of Clarissa", a super heady psychoanalytic dissection of the novel. I've yet to finish the novel.

I had a sexy "straight" jock college buddy who chose to write his honour's thesis on Paradise Lost by John Milton. The frustration drove him to my mouth and ass. He had a big cock and was a passionate lover. Married now with children.

“Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”

R101 shut up.

For me the one that I cannot get through is 100 years of Solitude. I start, I stop, I start, I stop. I cannot get into it no matter how hard I try.

Started Crime and Punishment but got sidetracked to a book of short stories. After C & P I’m going to attempt all 6 volumes of History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I have no doubt I will get three pages in and be deflected to some biography of one the cast of Real Housewives.

Anything by Susan Sontag. Her essays are written in almost impenetrable prose.

Bump

There’s a good audio dramatization of Proust. I think it was BBC. If you can’t bear reading the books.

Moby-Dick is the IMO the greatest American novel. Sorry, but it is.

The hardest part of reading Proust for me was overlooking the fact that he was an effete mama's boy who was gay and his narrator was an effete mama's boy who was straight and somehow was surrounded only by gay people. Because he had to make the narrator straight, but wanted to write about the jealousies and petty romantic rivalries in his own homosexual world (where you could be attracted to your romantic/sexual rival) he had to concoct the artifice that the narrator's heterosexual obsession and her circle of friends were all lesbians/bisexual. I found it hard to slog through The Prisoner and the Fugitive without rolling my eyes every page and asking "Who do you think you're kidding?"

Another random thing I find a bit alienating about A la recherche ...: I found it hard to visualize how old the narrator is in large parts, as he is such a clingy milksop yet seems to be a raging hormonal teen ...

This is probably the film to which R105 is referring. I was shown a couple times on PBS beaucoup years ago.

Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann.

I like The Magic Mountain, but this long book, Joseph and His Brothers, never ends.

War and Peace is not that difficult once you master all the characters.

^^It was shown...

My favorite novel that I have read several times and would have brought to me in the hospital is The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. Easy to read and a compelling story and characters that you can live with outside the pages of the book. I have tried the late James books and given up.

I read the novels I haven’t gotten around to when I’m sick and can’t get out of bed. I read Balzac when I had chicken pox. I was prescribed narcotics, so I could’ve read anything in that state.

I think this is what R105 was talking about. (You can get it legitimately through Amazon, of course).

Oh yes indeed I read all my Kafka at the Zürcher RehaZentrum Davos, good old smuggled Vicodins keeping me toasty warm in the open air solarium. The view:

R29 I like Pynchon but I don't read him linearly or in full. I'm not sure he's meant to be read that way, either.

For example; I enjoy picking up MASON & DIXON periodically, but I've never properly finished it nor read it from page one and onward in sequence. I just pick chapters or sections to chew over when I feel so inclined and take pleasure in immersing myself in the weird wonderful world. I couldn't tell you what the plot is sequentially or how events unfold in time, but I do feel as if I know the characters and can talk about evocative passages that stay with me.

His books are perfect digests for bibliomancy readings, too, if anyone is so inclined.

Is Gravity's Rainbow worth the effort?

R115 that's a good take and I appreciate it. For me Joyce's Ulysses is something like that. I haven't tried to read Mason & Dixon, but perhaps I shall.