r/Proust

I went to Paris recently. While there I did a ton of Proust things, such as visit his grace, the place where he lived, his bed in a museum, I ate madeleines, I read How Proust Can Change Your Life, and I also got severe food poisoning from a restaurant. That last bit is not relevant.
Anyway, I did all these Proust things and when I returned home I bought a collection of the books and was so excited. However, I immediately found the first one a slog and put it aside. But I do want to read them still… badly. I’ll try again soon.
I’m interested: Does anyone have any stories about what got them interested in reading Proust?

Hiii, I finished In Search of Lost Time and love it more than anything, reading it changed my life. What do I read after this. Does anything come close? What doI read after this

I recently completed In Search of Lost Time, and I loved it, and it is still top of mind despite reading two other books since I finished it. So here I am reading East of Eden 170 some odd pages in, and there is a sequence where Samuel, after meeting Cathy, is riding away thinking about her eyes, and that they seemed so familiar. He then relates a memory of witnessing a hanging as a young boy and recognizing that the "Golden Man" who was executed had eyes with "no depth," not "eyes of a man" and wondering of that is where he recognized in Cathy. Samuel's memory is very detailed and very in-depth, then we get the line

"there it was mined put of the dusty past"

and followed immediately by

"Doxology was climbing the last rise before the hollow of the home ranch and the big feet stumbled over stones in the roadway."

That right there is what triggered me, the horse stumbling over the stones in the middle of a mining of a memory felt very similar to the narrator, about halfway through Finding Time Again, stumbling over some uneven paving stones and that triggering a flood of memories not unlike the bite of the Madeline, in Swanns Way.

I know if you walk around with a Hammer everything looks like a nail, so will everything feel like a Proust reference if you just spent 5 months reading him, but Steinbeck's choice to mention the horse stumbling in the middle of a memory and revelation for Samuel feels to coincidental to be accidental.

What do you think??

Also I have NOT advanced far past this part in East of Eden so please so spoilers.

My god, the last 200 pages of the modern library edition are borderline torture. I know, I know: this is an important moment in the narrator’s life and shatters his illusion of higher society, etc etc. give me a good reason not to skim 😂. Looking forward to the next volume though.

i have proust's '75 folios & other unpublished manuscripts' but it was kinda boring so haven't read it much.

The description of 'swann in love' is making me curious.
So should i finish 75 folios first or start 'swann' ?

Fellow Proustians, I have a favor to ask:

I've seen cited in many places a letter from Proust to Jacques Riviere from February 7, 1914. It contains this quote: "Enfin je trouve un lecteur qui devine que mon livre est un ouvrage dogmatique et une construction!" Google translates: "Finally, I've found a reader who understands that my book is a dogmatic work and a construction!"

If anyone has a copy of the correspondence (in either French or English) which includes this letter, I would be very grateful if you could take a photo of the pages containing the letter and post it here. Thank you kindly.