Secret Proust

Last night I found out my volunteer co-coordinator (who I see practically every week, September-May) is in a Proust book club. And they're almost done! They started IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME about two years ago and they're going to finish by the end of the year. I think he's the first non-professor I know who will have read the whole thing. And! When he mentioned it, it was like "Oh, my book club," not "Have you read Proust? Because I've practically read the whole monkey-fighting thing."

I wanted to take this opportunity to invite you to tell me if you have also been in a secret Proust book club. Just because it would make me happy.

"Read so hard, libraries gonna fine me"

I don't want to suggest that the worldwide overlap between Jay-Z and Kanye West appreciators and bookbound nerds is all that small, although among this readership I suspect it is. But in the off chance you had a day as terrible as mine and you maybe feel like the world is going to end... this ought to help. It must be really hard to be Katy Perry right now.

"Bitches in Bookshops," by Annabelle Quezada and La Shea Delaney, 2012.

Big Book Double Edition

Regular Commenter Elizabeth sent me this article on Facebook via Flavorwire: "10 Novels That We Dare You To Finish." It's pegged to PARALLEL STORIES, a novel coming out this fall I have, yes, already requested to review because I like punishment.

I've read four of the books listed -- INFINITE JEST, A SUITABLE BOY, GONE WITH THE WIND and WAR AND PEACE, plus excerpts from REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST (but probably wouldn't add up to one of its nine volumes). ATLAS SHRUGGED and THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES I definitely intend to get along to, along with the rest of Proust. (Seriously, I still own my copies from college, refuse to sell them, but also make them live in exile with my parents. So I'm ambivalent. Maybe next year?)

Henry Darger gives me the creeps, frankly. Maybe if I make it through that documentary about him first...

Oh yeah, and while I was there, Facebook's new time-machine function dug up the following:

Never forget. If you still haven't gotten around to it you can still go back and read my review.

NYC: Center for Fiction Reading Groups announced for fall

Thomas Mann, David Foster Wallace, Herman Melville, et al. "For information on our ongoing Proust groups, click here"? Don't mind if I do! Maybe I also could read IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME in a year!

But wait... people will pay for the same kind of question-asking I do here for free?

STOP READING THIS BLOG RIGHT NOW and pay me my $2. And I promise I will never refer to "writer's cannons," because for the love. (It's in the PALE KING blurb. I know, right?!)