Proust season

November is the start of Proust Season for me, and two new books are bedside, waiting to be read: Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer and Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf.

Lehrer's looks to be about artistic or creative intuition and Wolf's on reading. Has anyone read either book, yet?

I'm in extended Proust Season as I am in the home stretch of In Search of Lost Time. I just finished Sodom and Gomorrah and started The Captive...

I haven't read either of the other books you mention. Let us know how they are and how they tie in with Proust.

Lucky you, touching down to earth from time to time.

I will do so.

I've read Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, but it has little to do with Proust and much to do with reading. Wonderful, thoughtful book where Maryanne Wolf conversationally surveys and ruminates on a lot of fairly complex neuroscience relating to how people as a whole developed the ability to read and how individuals learn to read. It's a book that combines science, history, developmental learning, and reading. There are a number of places where I wanted her to dive deeper (and in most of those places, you won't find a deeper dive in her more academic work). For example, she barely whets our curiousity on Socrates' opposition to written language, even though it's a pretty important part of her thought stream. My suggestion: read it in chapters, don't hurry, and spend a bit of time thinking about each chapter before moving on.

"read it in chapters, don't hurry, and spend a bit of time thinking about each chapter before moving on."

I'm not sure if I've ever read a book in any other fashion, but thanks for the insight - I'm looking forward to it.

As a committed book-inhaler, I rarely read books like that. Each page is like another salty potato chip...

That is how I read poetry - in big bites, swallow first, digest later. But not prose. Do you go back to re-read often?

For good books - yes, I not infrequently go back to re-read - pages, sections, chapters, or whole books. By the way, Wolf talks a bit about approaches to reading, and will do things like have you read a passage and then think about how you read it and what steps you needed to go through to do the reading and the processing. Quite interesting.

And possibly quite therapeutic for a chip muncher, I would imagine.

In answer to committed book- inhaler~ Ditto ~ with all the books out there never mind all the unread ones in ones own library, is there any other way to read?