My New Year’s resolution: To read Proust

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 17:04:00 +0000

As New Year's resolutions go, vowing to read more ought to be easy -- easier, anyway, than making it to the gym on icy January mornings or forgoing that plate of salty, golden French fries. Reading, after all, is fun. But if you have to make the resolution in the first place, chances are something is standing in your way.

For me, it's time and eye strain. For ages I've been meaning to finish Marcel Proust's "The Remembrance of Things Past" (now more commonly translated as "In Search of Lost Time," but I'm going to stick with the titles as translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, as that's the version I'm listening to). To date, I've yet to get past the second volume, "Within a Budding Grove," in print, but I have high hopes that, by switching to audiobooks, I can vault through the whole sequence of seven novels by the end of 2013 (despite needing to review at least one new book per week for my day job). After all, that's how I've consumed all five doorstops in George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series (the basis for HBO's "Game of Thrones") and Anthony Powell's famously Proustian 12-volume "A Dance to the Music of Time," deliciously read by Simon Vance.

Salon.com > Marcel Proust

My New Year’s resolution: To read Proust