On reading Proust

These two volumes of Proust arrived in the mail yesterday. They got here incredibly fast; I'd only ordered them two days earlier. The volumes are attractive. I love the cut edges; the print is fairly large, and at only 400 or so pages each, they don't look overwhelmingly long. Of course, if I bought all the volumes at once and set them side by side, they might look overwhelmingly long.

This will be my first encounter with Proust; beyond the short quotation here and there, I haven't read him before. I have the impression that it will be difficult; I've heard of long sentences, long paragraphs, not much action, pages and pages detailing the tiniest of impressions. I am curious about whether I will love this, which I very well might, or whether I will be bored by it. Or a little bit of both.

I am certainly ready to give it a try though. I don't plan to start reading Swann's Way for another week or so, but I'm looking forward to it, and hoping that the discussion here will help me understand the book and keep me enthusiastic.