No, I’ve not been drinking the lime-blossom tea with madeleines that slipped me into a delicious reverie on childhood, as did Swan, Proust’s hero in In Search of Lost Time. I’ve only read the first two volumes of that masterpiece. However recently I read Alain de Botton’s much shorter book How Proust Can Change Your Life, and came out greatly enamored of the book’s subject Marcel Proust. (For a details on how very strangely he did live, try the book.)


I found an audio recording of the introduction to this well-written, and thankfully terse, work:

Alain de Botton has a lovely website featuring some other introspective and interesting-looking books in case you are interested.