Proust has come up a lot in the last few weeks... In an Oscar-related radio review about the music from Ratatouille... In Sue from Sunflower Roots post about drinking and not drinking coffee and the reason behind it.
Robin Cook's name came up the other day in a discussion about mystery authors. And I remembered I'd read "Coma" when I was 9 or 10.
As soon as I read about the coffee incident I thought to myself, "That's why you can't stand scary books and movies, you read "Coma" when you were a kid." Because I was too old for my " I Can Read Books" and it was in the decorative Coca-Cola crate full of books my mom didn't take with her.
So I looked for the Proust book, which I barely began. I remember thinking after the first few pages, "So this guy is stuck in his bed, thinking about stuff. Yeah, this is going places..."
And now the book is gone.
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Mashup I am not going to make: "Simply the Best" and "What Are Words For?"
8 years ago
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My freshman college roommate (who seemed so beautiful and cool and worth emulation) had read all the volumes of Remembrance of Things Past, so I had to read it too. I did manage before I graduated from college, to get all the way through Swann's Way the first volume, and then got stopped. I liked the writing style -- sentences that meandered through one subordinate clause after another for twenty lines of text. I read Solzhenitsin's Cancer Ward at about the same time, and it occurred to me that the writing of both Proust and Solzhenitsin reflected the nature of the countryside around them -- intricate, packed, French gardens and open flat, Siberian plains. Of course I was reading both in translation so who knows how well the English really conveyed the original French and Russian.
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