The question of how to read Proust is one I've been approaching for fifteen years. I've started In Search of Lost Time three times and gotten 200 pages in each time before being pulled away by something that required my attention in a different way. I don't experience this as failure. I experience it as a book that exists in a different relationship to time than the books I read in normal circumstances.

Proust requires solitude, sustained attention, and the willingness to let association rather than plot drive your reading. These are conditions that are hard to maintain for the length of a novel that is 4,000 pages in its entirety. I have come to believe that Proust is not a novel you read — it's a practice you undertake, intermittently, over years.

My current plan is to read Swann's Way properly — slowly, with annotations — and accept that I may not read the rest of the novel in any coherent form. The opening is itself complete. The cork-lined room, the petites madeleines, the Combray section. This is not nothing.