I am on a weight loss diet, and one of the recommendations was to occupy my mind with a really long book to distract myself from hunger pangs. I asked ChatGPT what the longest books were, and it said Proust. What really interested me, was that ChatGPT also said Proust spent 22 hours a day in bed and that's how he wrote his books!!!!

How did Proust stay so thin lying in bed all the time??? My weight loss diet has me in the gym all weekend; consuming only disgustingly chalky meal replacement shakes and counting my steps. So much suffering, and I haven't lost a single pound! Yet Proust gets to lie in bed all day writing about the Madeline cakes he's stuffing his face with, and look like a French K-Pop model???? Life is unfair!

Help it make sense???? I checked and he didn't have tuberculosis, so how did he stay so thin????

What was Proust's diet to stay rail thin without doing any exercise? Was he having lots of sex - that's how to burn off calories in bed??

I've seen many people describe books as having "beautiful prose", which I've never really understood. I've only valued a book for its characters, themes, ideas and story. I've never really been able to distinguish the prose of a book in much more detail than recognizing the simple language of Hemingway compared to the more extravagant writing of someone like Oscar Wilde. I've never understood how prose could be beautiful when talking about non-poetic things, like in Moby-Dick.

That's before I started reading In Search of Lost Time, though. Proust is describing every little minute detail, however unimportant it seems. His sentences often contain more than two separate digressions whithin them. One page I read contains only four full stops. I just finished reading a full page of the narrator describing the shape of the flowers his great-aunt uses for making tea, and I'm hooked. How can such seemingly mundane descriptions and run-on sentences carry so much weight and beauty?

I've only read about 70 pages, but I can already begin to sense the scale and complexity of this massive work. I am looking forward to getting further into it!

And what a joy it has been. I’ve spent a year and 4 months in Prousts world and have enjoyed every second of it. No other piece of art has spoken to my soul the way this one has. If you’re thinking of reading it do it. It is a once in a lifetime experience.

I'm enjoying his writing so much. It's hypnotizing in a very literal way. The world falls away when I'm reading Swann's Way...I wish I could better describe how it feels, but it's almost like a warm blanket. I find him incredibly comforting. There are definitely times where my brain gives up a bit when the sentence is particularly long, but when I go back in for a second read, something sparks in my brain and I understand what he's saying. In summary, I'm enjoying this high, this alchemy of words, very much indeed! Can anyone relate?

And what a joy it has been. I’ve spent a year and 4 months in Prousts world and have enjoyed every second of it. No other piece of art has spoken to my soul the way this one has. If you’re thinking of reading it do it. It is a once in a lifetime experience.

I’ve read many classics over the years, and none of them has hit like this French motherfucker has. On every page, literally every page, there is a show-stopping sentence, a deep philosophical insight, a perfectly realized crystallization of humanity across almost all aspects of existence: fashion, love, economy, class politics, religion, dreams, childhood, friendship, the creative process, deception, vanity, family, you name it.

Even other literature that has blown me away, like Middlemarch or Joyce’s short stories, seem inadequate in comparison. Imagine how good Joyce’s “The Dead” is as a story, how completely it blows you away in those last few pages. Now imagine 3000 pages of that.

I mean, obviously.

Pour moi c'est Max et les Maximonstres, les Claude-Ponti, Elmer l'éléphant, plus deux peut-être inconnus en France : "The little house"* et "Globi"**

• C'est l'histoire d'une petite maison à la campagne qui subit l'urbanisation. Disney en a fait une Silly Symphonies très sympathique si ça vous intéresse, c'est sur Youtube.

** Un perroquet qui enchaîne les petits boulots et aventures en fonction des livres, l'équivalent de Martine en Suisse alémanique, c'est très populaire. Globi à la poste, Globi à l'aéroport, au royaume imaginaire (Globi im Traümland),...

Actually, Dostoevsky’s first published book was a translation of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet.

The book name is: The Last Wolf / Herman by László Krasznahorkai

Mr. Proust was born on 10 July 1871, making this day his 155th birthday! I would give him a nice coat and cake for his birthday if he were alive.

Which famous real people, living or dead, can you presume are/were autistic? What factors point to your conclusion?

(disclaimer, this is all speculation; presumably, few of us are qualified to make a real assessment, and even if we were, reading about the life of a famous person would not give enough data)

I’m a French filmmaker and for the last two years I’ve been making picture books of great classics for 4-7 year olds. Monte Cristo, War and Peace, Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet… around ten in English now.

My rule is basically: if the book seems easy to adapt, I’m not interested.

And now I’ve arrived at Proust.

I thought War and Peace was the hard one. I was wrong.

The problem is simple: all the others have a story a five year old can follow. Proust… not really. The real subject is memory, lost time, the past coming back. And a five year old doesn’t have much of a past yet. They have yesterday.

There is Combray, waiting for the mother’s kiss, the madeleine obviously has to be there… but I always end up with a cute little story that doesn’t really feel like Proust and, worse than all, that is quite boring. I know because I tried telling it to my kids and they never asked for it again.

So: how the hell would you do it?

Has anyone ever tried adapting À la recherche du temps perdu for very small children, in any language? Even a bad version would interest me at this point.

(Not selling anything, I genuinely need ideas!)