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@dadthatreads

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Just a Dad trying to find time to read while raising 3 boys.

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Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time
Started 03/01/26 – finished 24/10/26

Proust. In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past. Done.

This has been a journey, for sure, and one that has had its highs and lows. Undoubtedly, it deserves its place among the greatest works of Western literature. Proust’s prose is staggering: in its beauty, its complex narrative, and its sheer volume. It wasn’t always an easy journey, and at times was fraught with frustration. Do we really need 60 or 80 pages to discuss something that many writers would adequately manage in 10?

But here’s the thing. Time, the passing of it and the loss of it, is at the very core of this work. And that’s exactly what you need to understand if you’re going to read it properly.

I spent 10 months with it, and honestly, I don’t think that’s nearly enough. This is not a work to be rushed (if you can call 10 months rushing).

People talk a lot about its length, but when you consider how many books we here on Bookstagram read even in a single month, seven books really isn’t that much. So length isn’t the point. It’s the time you need to give to Proust’s prose.

Many of us here read a lot of difficult books, really difficult books, and on the surface ‘In Search of Lost Time’ is not a difficult work by comparison. It is, however, incredibly subtle. At least, it was for me. It wasn’t until I was well into the novel that its beauty and ambition really began to dawn on me.

And that, I think, is what readers need to allow time for: the opportunity to experience the reading unfurling for itself.

Should you read all seven books back to back in a month? Even two months? Absolutely not. Just because you can, really doesn’t mean you should.

This work needs space, and, of course, time. I’ll return to it at some point in the future I’m sure, though next time I think better over the course of several years.

The length of Proust’s work is not the real challenge. It’s the literary cathedral he has built, one we need to immerse ourselves in and give the time and space it needs to reveal its full scope and beauty.

#proust #marcelproust #insearchoflosttime #literature #bookstagram

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♾️ “In old age dreams are the weak current that rearranges the sand around your toes when you’re standing on the beach, helping you settle in so you can enjoy the sun and the wind.” ♾️

Years ago, my therapist told me “time does not heal all wounds, it adds layers to them.” If James Elkins experimental novel “Weak in Comparison to Dreams” could be distilled into one brief sentence (which the book itself would resist) I might choose that one. In Samuel Emmer’s world, this obsessive compulsive bacteriologist, this washed-up water management armchair psychoanalyst, there is no freedom, life is like a fire in the distance that doesn’t seem to move, a lovely danger that blazes very (or should I say veery?) slowly. And this fire, which is both dreamt and lived, can promise to chew up the bars of our caged lives, or fulfill the promise of psychoanalysis, where the dream attempts “to heal damage suffered during the day”, but the promise itself is always just smoke on the other side of the mountain, a far-off horizon never reached.

But is life truly weak in comparison to dreams? Perhaps. Emmer asserts that if Proust had lived long enough he would not be so optimistic about memory—for what else is a dream than a forgotten memory, a face that fades into the past and leaves us only with a feeling. Elkins writes, “music is strange portraiture: it preserves every nuance of mood and light, but faces are hard to see. The feelings are exact, but the people are gone.” One might say this is what occurs when reading a book like this. The majority of the book is like the present-tensed lived-experience of life, filled with the exactitude of anxiety and crises, entangled relationships, trauma responses and defence mechanisms, running in circles and figure eights. But time composts our catastrophes, breaking them down into inexact quieter landscapes.

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Many books carry the label “encyclopedic” or, like the works of W.G Sebald, blend genres and mediums like travelogue, visual essay, and documentarian prose fiction. Elkins gathers all of these labels, but what makes his experiment successful is his ability to allow the reader to authentically feel t

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After reading ‘Moby-Dick’ for the first time this week (yup, for the first time!), I think I’ve developed something of a crush on Herman Melville. By reputation, I was expecting MD to be good, but really, I was not prepared. I am entirely blown away (pun intended). It is stunning.

I knew it was more than just a story about a whale hunt, but I wasn’t prepared for its sheer beauty. It is deeply poetic and philosophical, with stunning prose; it is also brutal, gruesome and heartbreaking.

I’ve utterly fallen in love with it. For me, it’s going right up there among my all-time favourites, alongside ‘Ulysses’ and ‘The Recognitions’. I’ll definitely reread it soon, and next time I want to study it properly, as this first read was really just about enjoying it and getting to the end.

I should also say that I definitely found it a comfort read. Its beauty shines through without being nearly as taxing as some of my other most beloved works. Suspecting it might be just this, I chose to read along with an audiobook, and I can highly recommend the version narrated by Anthony Heald (see pics above). Perfect for curling up on the sofa with tea and cushions as the autumnal weather turns.

Sometimes it’s good for the soul simply to enjoy the pleasure of books, without the intellectual taxation.

So, with my newfound admiration for Melville, I’m moving straight on to ‘Billy Budd’, and possibly Andrew Delbanco’s biography. I would also love to reread Rodrigo Fresán’s gorgeous ‘Melvill’.

#mobydick #hermanmelville #classicliterature #billybudd #bookstagram

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“If we hadn’t been expelled, Paradise would soon have felt like a small dull town and we’d have caught the first train. I know better than to pine, for I am a student of history, which is, after all, a chronicle of missed opportunities, invitations unsent though nicely signed, plans gone awry, cakes half baked.”

What would happen if Holden Caulfied grew up to be a misogynist asshole in academic garb? If he became a poet who could wax loftily about tits and “transmogrify a turd”? Can complaining be an art form, bigotry be a craft tended to in darkness and isolation, disappointment lend itself a political reality? Can digging a tunnel be a “quarrel with the earth?”

“The Tunnel” by William H. Gass raises these questions, raised by a man who crawls out of a hole in which he is prepared to (pretend to) die, only “to let loose one last opinion” before expiring forever “like a worm.” On the surface (of the tunnel?), “The Tunnel” is a diatribe against society, as though Umberto Eco’s protagonist of “The Prague Cemetery”—the shadowy figure who scribed the antisemitic tract “The Elders of the Protocols of Zion”—were to take his hand at a kind of Cioranian cynicism, his own rendition of “The Trouble With Being Born.” The effect Gass’ character, William Frederick Koehler, has on the reader somewhat resembles Philip Roth’s Mickey Sabbath, in that the first impression looks dark, horrible, and as the book tunnels into something more complex, a true-to-life psychoanalysis occurs, a portrait of a bigot, a Nazi-sympathizer, a member of “the party of disappointed people,” a person whose envy, spite, malice, and loneliness has fashioned in them what Gass has famously dubbed a “fascism of the heart.”

(Continued in comments…)

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“The worship of the word must be pagan and polytheistic. It cannot endure one god.”

Blue is not one but many blues, cyan, cerulean, cobalt, and so a philosophical inquiry begins about blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, the blues as a film, a kind of song, a feeling, and Gass shades in as many blues as he can. Blue as private as sex and as public as the sky, it is “the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily…”

Though he praises Henry James, no one writes with such affection for language as Gass, I simply won’t believe he could be outdone in his adoration for the word as a way to the world. And a blue world it is! Blue mantle of the virgin. Blue in the pantry and the kitchen, a blue-being-in-the-world, a qualifier of the “slick sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet thick dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm.” Blue is the stones that Molloy sucks on and the chewing words that Gass munches like long blue grass. Gass soliloquies thus: “There is a swim of blue in the toothbrush glass. The loneliness of clothes draped over the backs of chairs; undies, empty lobbies, rumpled spreads[…]blue belongs to the past—to the minutes after masturbation, to thought, to detachment and removal, fading to the inside side of sex and the self that in the midst of pitch and toss has slipped away like a lucky penny fallen from the dresser.”

How can I write anything about this book without bathing in the body of its sensual text, swimming between pools of blue quotes? More and more hues and objects—“Blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese”—and the mood of Mondays and the mopes, the blue hot searing flame of rage, and the blue of grief in the absence of presence, the blue of being and the blue of non-being. Who else could write Blue like Gass?

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“We have never made any trade. Part of the Indians gave up their land. I never did. The earth is part of my body and I never gave up the earth.”

Written over the span of 15 years of intensive research, Vollmann’s “The Dying Grass,” his fifth-installment into his Seven Dreams of North American Landscapes, is a lyrical, experimental, 1356-page agonizing account of the events of the Nez Perce War of 1877. These events, which I knew nothing about prior to opening the book, were anything but straight-forward, and Vollmann complicates the broad-brushed account through his depiction of the morally ambiguous figure of General Oliver Otis Howard, the abolitionist Civil War one-armed veteran who founded Howard University and is placed in charge of rounding up the Nez Perce “Indians” into a reservation in Idaho. Alongside General Howard is Chief Joseph (also known as Heinmot Tooyalakekt or “The Red Napoleon”) who leads the Nez Perce in a war following the famous “thief treaty” the Americans made to steal the Nez Perce land (“Our Mother”), reducing it by 90%—a land which often speaks aloud through Vollmann’s ambitious text.

In fact, one wonders at the political shape of Vollmann’s so-called “grass-text” itself, which sways from page to page with a unique indentation system meant to blow the reader’s attention from a consciousness of the immediate action of war strategy and individual rumination to the scorched earth, the narrow cañons and arroyos and open plains that are mutilated by the Americans. The text oscillates between something like a post-modern poem to a screenplay where the landscapes themselves engage as a major voice in the dialogue, where “the graves in the grass and golden grass” speak to the “multiple years of erasures,” and where the sun is “bloody-gold like an autumn pumpkin” and the “fat of dead children still sizzle like resinous wood,” the text sharing the groans of the earth where the “burned children cannot stop weeping.”

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Perhaps this form is Vollmann’s response to the self-regulating machine that is the late 19th-century American Government, a way of moving away from the sort of automatic beauty that 19th-century w

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Bohumil Hrabal 1914-1997

One of the highlights of my summer in 2026 has been without a doubt discovering Bohumil Hrabal, for which thanks go to @jacks_paperbacks @anatomia_do_livro and @jonathanreads_books. A prolific writer, with nearly 50 titles published including novels, novellas, short story collections and memoirs, over the last month I’ve read four:

- I Served The King of England
- Closely Observed Trains
- Too Loud A Solitude
- Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

This order of reading was based solely on availability, though for those also new to his work I’d highly recommend it – starting with probably his two best known, and, if it’s possible to use the term, more ‘conventional’ works, followed by two outstanding, more experimental titles.

Hrabal’s writing at first appears playful and charming, which it is, though the further in you go it becomes clear that everything is deeply entrenched in dark, political satire. His playful style is a massive juxtaposition to reoccurring themes of political oppression, censorship, Nazi Germany, war, suicide and misogyny, to name a few.

Writing through times of great political censorship, Hrabal’s style was an attempt to avoid these censors, though he was not always successful. Never too far from political controversy it seems, he was banned from publishing in 1968, when his best known works were then circulated in samizdat editions, including ‘I Served The King of England’ and ‘Too Loud A Solitude’.

He died in 1997 after falling from a hospital window in Prague, which reports initially tried to suggest was due to an attempt at feeding pigeons. Those who knew him completely rejected this, angry that even in death he was still being censored, in order to cover up his suicide.

I loved all of these books. Each one in its own special way unceasingly gifts the joy of reading, though ‘Too Loud A Solitude’ and ‘Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age’ are clear standouts for me. So with plenty to choose from, I’m keen to find more.

#bohumilhrabal #literature #books #bookstagram #bookblogger

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“A lot can be forgiven anyone who, amid the filth and stench of camp violence, remains a human being.”

To say that Vasily Grossman’s final unfinished work “Everything Flows,” is a 20th-century evolution of Dostoevsky’s “Notes From a Dead House” or a more mature work than even Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” might be true in the sense that all of these accounts of the gulags (or, in Dostoveksy’s case, the Siberian prison) analyze oppressive structures and the societies that they beget, and yet they communicate not even a sliver of why Grossman, for me, is a greater writer of sorrow and kindness than both. It could be a case of apples and oranges with respect to Dostoevsky, but there is a certain pathos, a crippling senseless kindness and love that Grossman is determined to show for everyday peasant families, a total recognition of the suffering of women and children, a refusal to look away. Only Tolstoy comes close to this all-embracing love for the broken people who populate his books.

Written in the years leading up to his death in Moscow in 1964, “Everything Flows” is more decisive than even “Life & Fate” in its criticism of the USSR. The essays criticizing Lenin, mixed with the short fragmented accounts of the Terror Famine and the detailed humiliations of the “zeks” tormented in the gulags, were still highly controversial in a time where it may have been safe to publicly condemn Stalin, but not yet the Soviet’s beloved Lenin, the foundation on which Stalin constructed his State. In fact, Grossman opposes not only Stalin and Lenin, but the very notion of a uniquely “Russian soul” as something that enhances human freedom. He writes, “The prophecies of Russia’s most powerful minds and hearts had one fatal flaw in common. They all saw power of the Russian soul and its significance for the world, but they all failed to see that this soul had been a slave for a thousand years, that its peculiarities had been engendered by the absence of freedom. However all-powerful you are, what can you give to the world if you have been a slave for a thousand years?”

(Continued in comments…)

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“Drear ritual turned its wheel…The passions, no greater than candle flames, flickered in Time’s yawn, for Gormenghast, huge and adumbrate, out-crumbles all.”

How exactly does Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast” fail, not only as literary fantasy, but also as literary fiction? This question and others are some that my brothers and I raised during our August group read. What exactly disappoints our expectations and what does this suggest about our approach to reading literature?

Reflecting on “Titus Alone”, “Gormenghast”, and “Titus Alone”, any reader will recognize that Peake’s ability to describe the architecture of his castle, the crumbling gothic roofscapes, the Tower of Flints, which “at night the owls made an echoing throat”, the Twisted Woods, The Hall of Bright Carvings, is where he, like his contemporary Tolkien, shines. While Peake’s introduction to his world is marvellous, filled with “long evenings like blond eternities,” his characters seem to be unable to measure up to the scale of the world that they inhabit. Instead, bearing allegorical, Dickensian names—like Steerpike, Prunesquallor, and Mr.Flay—they remain trapped eponymously inside their reductive titles, their dialogue strongholded by their over exaggerated, comic natures. They are, like the burned library in “Titus Groan,” mere “corpses of thought.”

(Continued in comments…)

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RIP Rick Harsch. Such sad news. A literary and publishing legend. You will be greatly missed. 🖤

@corona_samizdat_books

#rickharsch #coronasamizdat #rip #bookstagramcommunity

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“Eckhart has written, ‘An angel in Hell flies in his own little cloud of paradise.’ I always took that to imply that a devil in Paradise flies also in his own little cloud of Hell. But I don’t think I’m a devil.”

I cannot remember a time whilst reading that I felt the level of internal conflict as when reading “The Kindly Ones” by Jonathan Littell. Published in 2009 and translated from the French, Littell’s masterpiece in WW2 fiction is not only interesting by virtue of it being a fictionalized memoir of a Nazi written by a Jewish novelist, but also because of the application of the transgressive, erotic, surreal French literary tradition that Littell applies to the events of Operation Barbarrosa, the Battle of Stalingrad, the horrors of Auschwitz, and the final days before the fall of Berlin. Much like Celine and Bataille, Littell’s protagonist, the lawyer and SS-officer Max Aue, offers up a pessimistic vision of “the worst of all possible worlds,” the “idea that a hole could also be a whole.”

This, on its own, would be highly fascinating and remarkable for any reader. The connection between perverse desire, sexual deviancy, and the excessive violence committed because of a surplus of built-up energy is a theory explored by Bataille, one where war is a sacred excess which is meant to break the order of social and sexual taboos, a kind of “collective effervescence” to use Durkheim’s term. According to Bataille, literature is then an alternative space to explore these transgressions, a way to exceed our reasonable everyday structures and to investigate the breakage of these structures. Okay, perhaps we agree with Bataille, perhaps we do not. I, personally, on this point, do not. But I can see how Bataille might consider using excessive descriptions to shock the reader as a way for them to reconsider their existence in the world. Sure enough, that occurs, but as a psychotherapist I see little benefit in trying to revisit our existence by sifting through pages of vomit, excrement, incest, and at times, all of these at once.

(Continued in comments…)

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✨ Priorities ✨
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These three will constitute the center of my reading life for the foreseeable future. That is assuming I can resist my own reading habits, a dubious proposition at best. I have never been a monogamous reader. I inevitably find myself oscillating between multiple books at once, devouring shorter novels over the course of a weekend, only to derail whatever carefully constructed reading plan I had the moment another irresistible work wanders into my field of vision. An occupational hazard of being a book lover I suppose.
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There are a number of prior commitments still demanding completion. I have several Shakespeare plays I intend to finish this month, roughly two hundred pages remaining in Infinite Jest, an upcoming book club at the local indie bookstore, and more than a few titles from the recently announced longlist of that particularly distinguished literary prize that I hope to read sooner rather than later. In other words, it is the perennial dilemma of the serious reader, an ever-expanding library and a decidedly finite amount of time. To read voraciously is also to cultivate a perpetual dissatisfaction with these limits.
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What excites me most is returning to Elkins’ world of Samuel Emmer. Weak in Comparison to Dreams was one of my favorite novels I read last year. Elkins strikes me as one of the few contemporary American novelists genuinely invested in extending and experimenting with the formal possibilities of the novel.
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Waiting alongside is The Rouse by China Miéville, a novel already spoken of in almost mythical terms. A purported maximalist behemoth, encyclopedic, geographically and historically expansive, sprawling over the course of twelve hundred pages.
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Exciting months lie ahead. If there is any enduring remedy for the anxieties of modern life, I continue to suspect it is to disappear into impossibly large books. I’m convinced that the maximalist novel is one of the last places where complexity is not merely tolerated but celebrated, a refusal to reduce the world to something simpler than it is.

Happy reading ✌️

#bookstagram #bibliophile

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