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Hey!
I thought it would be nice to have a place where we can just learn about each other and why we turned to this masterpiece. (Pardon my English, it's not my first language.)
As for me, having heard lots of positive opinions I was interested in Proust and his work for a while but those 7 volumes in the story have been scaring me away. I hate spoilers so by the time I finally picked it up with 2015 Proust reading group, I didn't know anything neither about Proust's style or the plot itself. I was a little behind the reading schedule so I tried to read as fast as I could to catch up with them. And as I did, I kept almost like tripping over the text. Oooh, it was making me so annoyed I COULD NOT READ IT FAST, the text itself slowed me down....When in the discussion I saw how some of my groupmated gazed with admiration at that iconic scene with madeleines, I realised that I hadn't been approaching him right, that that was the beauty of this work. And this time when I am starting it again, I am going to let even the finest bits of the narrator's experience and memories fill my own heart.

Yes, you're right; Proust must be read slowly. Tante Leonie is one of my favorites...I love the comparison Proust makes, when he describes a person wanting to know what Versailles was all about, reading Saint-Simon, etc., when all he has to do it study a middle-aged lady giving full rein to all her neurotic impulses! Of course, he puts it better than that...

Thanks, Uliana. Lovely idea! I studied Proust in college, wrote a thesis after reading the whole thing very fast- which, as you described above, isn't the best way to read the work. I've started many times again, always promising myself I'd read again from start to finish, but never succeeding. I hope this is the year to do so, with the help of this group. My initial study had a deconstructionist approach- with a lot of close reading of words and signs, etymologies and such. I'm looking to read the work again towards an increased awareness of the emotional narrative and artistic journey.

Note on rereading & getting to know one another. I taught HS English for over 20 years, and I noticed something. There were some novels, short stories, poems, plays, etc., that one got extremely tired of. And ones that one did not. I must have taught "Romeo and Juliet" over 40 times and it never palled. Proust: same thing.

I'be even heard of some people having it as their desk book, so to speak, and they come back to it every now and then.

Elizabeth---did you teach Proust to high-school students, or it it a book which never tires you? I am a re-reader and there are a lot of things I reread. I rate a book or poem or play very poorly if I don't want to reread it.

C.S. Lewis (genuflect here) says that no one can call himself a reader unless he (or she) reads books more than once.

Just once in HS; I had an honors class who had the vocabulary word "evoke" and I read them the madeleine passage; I still remember their--was it stunned? or rapt?--faces!

And, no, one is never tired of great art. As a museum director said, asked: How do you tell? He said: We hang it on the wall for 50 years; if it just looks better and better, we've got something.

And then there is Proust's famous passage (I have no idea where this is) about the famous archaeologist who is the museum's go-to guy about antiquities...(Assyrian? Possibly). But: if they put him in front of one, and he weeps, it's genuine!

And I've always liked Nabokov's quotation that the "only reading is rereading."

Natalie, Nabokov! That's whom I thought of right away too!

Elizabeth wrote: "C.S. Lewis (genuflect here)...
And then there is Proust's famous passage (I have no idea where this is) about the famous archaeologist who is the museum's go-to guy about antiquities...(Assyrian? Possibly). But: if they put him in front of one, and he weeps, it's genuine!"

Good memory; it's in "The Guermantes Way:"

"The Kaiser is a man of astounding intelligence,� resumed the Prince, “he is passionately fond of the arts, he has for works of art a taste that is practically infallible, he never makes a mistake: if a thing is good he spots it at once and takes a dislike to it. If he detests anything, there can be no more doubt about it, the thing is excellent.�
Everyone smiled.
“You set my mind at rest,� said the Duchess.
“I should be inclined to compare the Kaiser,� went on the Prince, who, not knowing how to pronounce the word archaeologist (that is to say, as though it were spelt with a “k�), never missed an opportunity of using it, “to an old archaeologist� (but the Prince said “arsheologist�) “we have in Berlin. If you put him in front of a genuine Assyrian antique, he weeps. But if it is a modern fake, if it is not really old, he does not weep. And so, when they want to know whether an arsheological piece is really old, they take it to the old arsheologist. If he weeps, they buy the piece for the Museum. If his eyes remain dry, they send it back to the dealer, and prosecute him for fraud. Well, every time I dine at Potsdam, if the Kaiser says to me of a play: ‘Prince, you must see it, it’s a work of genius,� I make a note not to go to it; and when I hear him fulminating against an exhibition, I rush to see it at the first possible opportunity."
Marcel Proust

This all reminds me of a statement by a college prof, about a million years ago: All art is about art...

feeling demoralized because I haven't read- have been too busy. and distracted by news etc. Am trying now to catch up. anyone else feeling this way?

Rereading for me, too, but never with a group. First time I read this novel, a friend's father had asked what I was reading and I said Proust and he said, "For the first time? I envy you." Like all the best books, something new comes up each time I've read it, and the (mostly great, esp. Lydia Davis') new translations give even more scope for rediscovery. I laughed when a French friend told me that her (French) father told her that after she'd finished reading Proust in French she should really read him in English, too, because the translations are so good that they add to, rather than subtract from, its depth.