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All Meat Looks Like South America by Bruce McCall
Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
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The Blues of Flats Brown by Walter Dean Myers
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Haven Stones: The Last Unicorn by Richard Carbajal
Humanism for Parents — Parenting without Religion by Sean Curley
Hurricane by Arnaldo Ricciulli
I Spy Christmas by Jean Marzollo
If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss
Immortality Inc. by Robert Sheckley
Mars: The Red Planet by Isaac Asimov
Monsters! Draw Your Own Mutants, Freaks & Creeps by Jay Stephens
North from Calcutta by Duane Evans
Perseverance: True Voices of Cancer Survivors by Carolyn Rubenstein
Read Me edited by Gaby Morgan
Resonance by A. J. Scudiere
Right to Remain Silent by Penny Warner
Sahwira: An African Friendship by Carolyn Marsden
The Shining by Stephen King
Son of the Great River by Elijah Meeks
The Sun by Ralph Winrich
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
That's Not My Dinosaur by Fionna Watt
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
What the Hell is a Groom and What's He Supposed to Do? by John Mitchell
Wolf Willow by Wallace Stegner
You Suck by Christopher Moore
Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
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Swann's Way: 11/28/09

When I finished my weekly posts of my reading of Ulysses I asked on Twitter which book I should do next. The answer was a resounding In Search of Lost Times by  Marcel Proust. It seemed to me like the perfect choice. It took me 19 weeks to finish the first volume, 0812972090?Swann's Way.

In Search of Lost Times is like Don Quixote, written and published over a number of years and revised and translated. In the case of Don Quixote the book is manageable with onionskin paper to be squeezed into one thick volume (even with all the illustrations). Not Proust's work though. It's massive. It makes The Lord of the Rings look like a short story. The Modern Library edition that I'm reading offers the seven volumes in six. As there are seven distinct titles, I will treat Proust's oeuvre as seven separate books instead of one massive novel. I'm not doing this for scholarly reasons, just convenience

In Swann's Way there are two stories. There's the one of a young boy growing up among important and well known adults, aristocrats, artists and other celebrities. As a young child he is in awe of the adults around him. When the book closes and he has grown into young adulthood he sees his heroes with a better understanding of human nature. The person who brings about the end of his hero worship is Charles Swann

Most of this six hundred page volume is centered on Charles Swann and his courtship with Odette. She though isn't the idealized vision of beauty and sophistication he thinks she is. She is his equal in temperament, vanity and vices. She is best and worst thing that could possibly happen to Swann

I have a brand new copy of Within a Budding Grove which I am now working my way through. I suspect it will be another five months to finish this volume.

Swann's Way posts:

Lisa's First Word, Baby Mine, I Sing the Body Electric, The Lady in Pink, Bleeding Gums Murphy, Caturday, Cherry Blossoms, Marge Simpson, Liana Telfer, Bender in Love, Margaret Dumont, Hyacinth Bucket, Rose, Mildred Krebs, Pepé Le Pew, Jack Harness, Cordelia Chase, Saffron, Thomas O'Malley.

Within a Budding Grove posts:

Nanowrimo, Cheers, Robert Langdon, Kif and Amy, Dead Weight, Clark Kent, Lex Luthor, Paris is a Lonely Town, And Then There's Maude, A Cafe Terrace at Night, North by Northwest, Top Hat, Chez Deetz, Ah, My Goddess!, David, Auntie Mame, Brunhilde Esterhazy, Gusteau's, Shell Beach.

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