For the past six years I have read one volume of Proust in the month of January. I’ve pledged to myself to continue reading a volume every January for the rest of my reading life. I call January “Proust month,” and it started as a way to ward off the winter doldrums, to make one of the worst months of the year somehow enjoyable, and to finally read the behemoth. I’m almost finished my first complete reading of In Search of Lost Time. I encourage others to join me. I like the idea of people reading a different volume of the same book at the same time, a kind of reading group out of joint. It has also been an interesting exercise in memory, to take up with the book where I left off over a year ago. Albertine has just absconded and the narrator is lost in his grief. What Proust manages to do in one page, in terms of both affect and ideas, is staggering.
