It’s one of the downsides of being an academic, and reading so much in one’s field, that it detracts from reading for pleasure. I used to read novels all the time, now I find it difficult to get into them. Except for one: Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. I have read it in English, and I have read it in French. The French, for some reason, was easier. I really like Proust’s mind. Indeed he says at one point in the final volume, that people who “get him” will in some sense “read themselves”. And so it proves. For Proust…