Over at the Guardian, Alex Clark is spot on. August is the time for the long read, indeed the time for "another assault on the unscaled mountains of literature." Last year she failed with Henry James, but this year she is setting off to climb Mount Proust, a peak that has defied, among others, the distinguished novelist Susan Hill until just recently, as she confesses in the Spectator Diary.
While Susan Hill took 50 years to get round to reading Proust successfully through to the end, I realise I can give him a few years yet. I have begun In Search of Lost Time at least once, but after fifty pages in which that madeleine never quite made it from teacup to mouth, I gave up.
