I have received a suggestion for our next group reading project, and the suggestion is Proust. Any thoughts? Any sensations of uncontrollable shuddering and/or delight?

On her blog, my friend Charlotte Gordon has recently mentioned her own thoughts about reading Proust:

I have been noticing that the novels I most enjoy these days move very briskly. I used to love exactly the opposite kind of thing: Proust, Dostoevsky. Maybe this is because I cannot believe how stuck I can get. I am moving like molasses; I have spent the last week on the same paragraphs, the same sentences, the same page. For the sake of variety, I go backwards and add details into past scenes. I think I am avoiding moving forward and I believe readers can feel that kind of delay when it happens in the prose. But I do not know how to get myself out of this trough. I check my email. I pace around. The orange cat is on my writing table playing with the lamp chain. She is far more interesting than Mary Shelley. [Charlotte is writing abook about about Mary and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.] I can hear some of you telling me to take a break, but I have tried that and if I get too far away from my desk I get anxious. I am in the middle of something and need to get out of it. When you are by yourself all day, alone with your own brain and pool of moods, you get to be something of an expert — on yourself, that is. And I think I am afraid to move into Mary’s future. It all goes downhill now. Two years from now, Shelley will die. And these next two years are filled with misunderstandings, estrangement, and affairs.

Myself, I have always found Proust difficult to love, but have always blamed my own intelligence for that difficulty. I've also found Dostoevsky difficult to love: for I've been (in all readerly ways) a lifelong Tolstoy girl, and I've noticed that readers tend to fall in one or the other Famous Russian Novelist camp. Still, look what tilting with Milton has led me into. Proust might be just the ticket for my habituated brain.