Early in March, as New York City prepared for a shutdown, I felt a sense of adventure in ordering a stockpile of books along with black beans and toilet paper. Read: The exquisite pain of reading in quarantineīefore accepting that I was no different from everyone else sublimating their ambition into a “quar project,” my reading habits had changed naturally with the phases of the pandemic.

What I found was a novel so preoccupied with the minutiae of experience that I had no choice but to reappraise my own. His novel cycle, In Search of Lost Time, also presents the attractive challenge of surmounting a massive text-multiple volumes, stretching between 3,000 and 4,000 pages, depending on the edition-and the subsequent entry into a rare and rather pretentious club of readers. Proust’s work has many qualities that might recommend it for pandemic reading: the author’s concern with the protean nature of time, the transportive exploration of memory and the past, or simply the pleasure of immersing oneself in the richly detailed life of another. My friend’s response shortly thereafter confirmed this: “It’s too early for me to follow this sentence.” Next to me, my 2-year-old daughter slowly guided a spoonful of oatmeal into her mouth, noticing my struggle. It was a photo of a page from Swann’s Way, and it took several attempts for me to capture the near-page-length sentence in its entirety. One morning a few weeks ago, I sent my friend a Proust text.

In search of lost time complete set