Remembrance of Things Past Again

I remember trying to read Swanns Way (the first part of Proust's Rememberance of Things Past) before. This was back over the autumn of 2008. I used to read it on those luxuriously long intervals between calls at the old call centre job. Or at least I think I did. I took it down to Cornwall with me to in November of that year, read it to a soundtrack of Darkthrone's Dark Thrones and Black Flags album which had just been released. At some point over that week, I decided there was no point in continuing it as I wasn't enjoying it all. I wonder what happened to that copy of it. It was a large cheaply printed copy, and I can't even remember where I bought it from... but I do know it was from a bookshop closed down. I'm reading it again now, obviously, and so far I am enjoying it, but it's a long book, and the shadow of that earlier failure hangs over me. I don't want another reading incident like last summer where Bolano's The Savage Detectives hung like a weight round my neck, an albatross that stretched all over summer, from the Jubilee till whenever. I was so sick of that book by the end, and really just wasn't paying any attention to it. It became like some endurance test rather than something to be enjoyed, and it was a fantastic book, but I just didn't have the attention span required for it then. I hope my focus has improved this year, Remembrance of Things Past is even longer...