Jordan Mattox

Along with Ulysses and Middlemarch, In Search for Lost Time is one of those books that’s on a lot of people’s bucket-lists. I just finished reading Swann’s Way, the first in the series of seven books. It was beautiful and many passages were poetry, but it was certainly a challenge. I assumed though that when I finished reading, I would feel a sense of accomplishment. I did not feel that. Instead, I felt how inadequate one reading a challenging book is. Like reading any challenging text, you often have to read it multiple times before you begin to understand. I think that I knew this when I began reading the book, but, after I made it through the first difficult read, I suppose I was hoping for a stronger feeling of understanding. Alas, this is why many of these great books are not read. To get to a place of understanding, you need to commit to multiple readings of the book. In other words, we need to celebrate re-readers and avoid quantitative book challenges.