Latest news with #InSearchOfLostTime
Washington Post
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Peter Mendelsund lost the desire to read, and is still awash in books
Perhaps pleasure reading had come to seem like a busman's holiday? 'I didn't used to feel that way,' Mendelsund said during a recent visit to his home in Manhattan. 'It's a very strange thing. I think it's a combination of reading so much during my life and then working in the industry for a while and just seeing the churn.' During the pandemic, depressed, 'I read Proust for the first time, the whole shebang, and then I finished it, and I just sort of felt — done.' And it wasn't just that 'In Search of Lost Time' felt so perfect and complete, or that it was such a long undertaking. 'I just couldn't pick anything up anymore.' Still, despite his diminished appetite for prose, Mendelsund's sizable apartment remains awash in books. 'The piles are eventually — I think — going to be something. I don't know what. I have to make some order,' he said. He distributed cups of coffee, then showed us around.
Daily Mail
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Which 3 books leave Reeta Chakrabarti cold?
What Book ... ... are you reading now? I HAVE just finished I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, which is one of the most extraordinary novels I've ever read. It was published in the mid-1990s, but is now being rediscovered – my daughter and her friend read it, and passed it on to me. Thirty-nine women and one female child live in a cage for as long as the child can remember, kept imprisoned by male guards. One day there is a sudden commotion and the men flee, leaving the cage open. What ensues is devastating and impenetrable. I hope someone explains it to me one day. ...would you take to a desert island? Impossible to imagine having only one book, but given that I would at last have the luxury of many hours with nothing to do, let me cheat and take a series. Anthony Powell's A Dance To The Music Of Time is a 12-parter – I got halfway through it some years back. When I was much younger and more energetic I also got halfway through Marcel Proust's In Search Of Lost Time. I can see a theme emerging here, to do with time and halfway through. ...first gave you the reading bug? Like all children of my vintage, I read a lot of Enid Blyton and Louisa May Alcott. But the first 'proper' book was Jane Eyre, which fell into my hands when I was eight, probably because Bronte was next to Blyton in the library. I don't know what I made of the romance or of the mad woman in the attic, but I was gripped by the cruelty meted out to young Jane by her cold-hearted aunt, and the deprivations she suffers at Lowood school. I have been a reader ever since. ... left you cold? I HAVE never got beyond the first page of Moby Dick. I am assured that a treat awaits me if I persevere, so one day perhaps I will. I struggle with Virginia Woolf and feel guilty, as she's the sort of author I ought to like in principle. I am a huge fan of Kazuo Ishiguro but had to plod my way through The Buried Giant. And while I read Ulysses once for my literature degree, I am very unlikely ever to pick it up again. (I hope my husband doesn't see this, he loves it…)
