How many pages proust

Pride and Prejudice. Anxious People. The Morning Star. Brave New World. The Inseparables. Little Women. The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Secret Garden. Anna Karenina. The Power of the Dog. The Count of Monte Cristo. The Lincoln Highway.

Our top books, exclusive content and competitions. One of the few worthwhile things to have come out of lockdowns is the reminder that, in the same humble way as our grandparents, who spent goodness knows how much money on Time Life boxed sets of Wagner LPs and all those volumes of the Harvard Classics, many of us still take an old-fashioned aspirational interest in highbrow culture. While the reality of pandemic reading has doubtless fallen short of these ambitions, it is heartening to know that thousands of people last April at least thought to themselves, "This is my chance to read Proust.

Remembrance of Things Past as I prefer to think of it is probably the least read of all "Great Books," with the obvious exception of Finnegans Wake , which is neither great nor a book.

Why this is the case is not entirely clear. It cannot be a simple question of length. At a few thousand pages and around 1,, words, Proust is only slightly longer than Harry Potter , which has been read by millions of children, and A Song of Ice and Fire , a novel cycle about hobbits who have sex, stands unfinished at more than 5, pages. Both of these have sold many millions of copies. The latter has also taken much longer to write than Remembrance.

If I had to guess, I would say that in the vast majority of cases the same handful of things prevent the average reader who is otherwise inclined to sit down with Proust from getting on. To begin at the beginning, the Combray overture at the outset of the first volume, Swann's Way, "For a long time I used to go to bed early" is the most pleasant description of sleepiness ever written.

It is also more or less the only feeling most people associate with the author who, they would be astonished to learn, wrote equally well about love, family, religion, art, music, politics, fashion, the beauty of the natural world, anti-Semitism, and the weather.

For this reason, my first piece of advice for aspiring Proustians is not to read the book at night, which is when most people tend to enjoy novels. Instead, begin your reading in the morning, with a cup of coffee and a clear head. For most people this will be the only path to the undiscovered country beyond Combray. It follows from here that Proust should be read slowly, 20 or so pages at a time. When you are a thousand or so pages in and cannot help yourself from pressing on to learn what Brichot has to say about the death of Swann, you will have reached the stage at which it is probably acceptable to lie down with Proust.

What I found was a novel so preoccupied with the minutiae of experience that I had no choice but to reappraise my own.

Read: The exquisite pain of reading in quarantine. Early in March, as New York City prepared for a shutdown, I felt a sense of adventure in ordering a stockpile of books along with black beans and toilet paper. One night, the two novels happened to be stacked on top of each other beside my bed; I found myself haunted by the cryptic dispatch of their titles. Frontline workers kept our household equipped as my partner, my daughter, and I negotiated work and play in the relative safety of our Brooklyn apartment.

Between attending Zoom meetings and laboriously staging morality plays featuring an all-Elmo cast, reading truly was escapism. As I tore through my first few quarantine reads, I was already anticipating my next book order, and grateful for the time I now had to do the thing I always wished I had more time to do.

When summer began, my attention chafed. Momentum gave way to indolence as I watched yet another projected return-to-work date pass. My eyes would dart between words like the fruit flies sussing out the peaches and plums in my kitchen. I abandoned fiction for history, reading about the birth of modern China, the lead-up to World War I, and the Great Migration, but the allure of the distant past faded quickly.

When I switched to philosophy to spur my critical reading faculties, my will buckled after barely 40 pages of Nietzsche. In late June, following the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing protests, reading felt like a frivolous distraction.

After months of seclusion, resounding political and human exigencies proved that I could shut the world out for only so long. I flicked through The New York Times on my phone, rarely reaching the end of an article. As the pandemic continued, small changes flickered through my daily experience: a rented office space close by, the return of our nanny.