Remembrance of Remembrance
I can count on about one finger the number of books I've reread. So many books, so little time. And of all books, Remembrance of Things Past, dense and 3000 pages long, would seem the absolute least likely candidate for a reread especially by me, a slow reader. It took me six months to finish it the first time and I had to take about a month's break after Part II to give my brain a break. The book I had read immediately before "Remembrance..." was "War and Peace," which seemed like a Reader's Digest condensation in comparison.
So as I neared the end of "Remembrance..." I put in an order for a new batch to Barnes and Noble and immediately upon finishing "Remembrance..." eagerly picked up a new book.
There's the proverbial "something" about "Remembrance...", though. Maybe it's just as simple as the beginning being so long ago from the time I finished that I had a hard time remembering how it began. Maybe too that anytime you read a work of Literature you know that you're missing a lot of nuances in a first read.
But in addition to those things I think it was the feeling that I had that this was The Book, that it was the Story of Life or something. I remember being in the middle of my next book, Thomas Kuhn's "Essential Tension," and just lifting my eyes up and stopping and getting up and going over and taking the first part of "Remembrance..." down and beginning again.
A couple of days later I was in my "reading room" at work, the one with the porcelain fixtures, and was reading a recent issue of Newsweek. They had a small obit on Shelby Foote that mentioned that he loved Proust and had read "Remembrance..." NINE times. I was in good company. There's something about that book.
-Benjamin Harris
I can count on about one finger the number of books I've reread. So many books, so little time. And of all books, Remembrance of Things Past, dense and 3000 pages long, would seem the absolute least likely candidate for a reread especially by me, a slow reader. It took me six months to finish it the first time and I had to take about a month's break after Part II to give my brain a break. The book I had read immediately before "Remembrance..." was "War and Peace," which seemed like a Reader's Digest condensation in comparison.
So as I neared the end of "Remembrance..." I put in an order for a new batch to Barnes and Noble and immediately upon finishing "Remembrance..." eagerly picked up a new book.
There's the proverbial "something" about "Remembrance...", though. Maybe it's just as simple as the beginning being so long ago from the time I finished that I had a hard time remembering how it began. Maybe too that anytime you read a work of Literature you know that you're missing a lot of nuances in a first read.
But in addition to those things I think it was the feeling that I had that this was The Book, that it was the Story of Life or something. I remember being in the middle of my next book, Thomas Kuhn's "Essential Tension," and just lifting my eyes up and stopping and getting up and going over and taking the first part of "Remembrance..." down and beginning again.
A couple of days later I was in my "reading room" at work, the one with the porcelain fixtures, and was reading a recent issue of Newsweek. They had a small obit on Shelby Foote that mentioned that he loved Proust and had read "Remembrance..." NINE times. I was in good company. There's something about that book.
-Benjamin Harris
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