How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton #BookReview

How Proust Can Change Your Life is another book that’s been languishing too long on the NF TBR and rediscovered in the annual Tidy the Bookshelves marathon chez moi.   Did I buy it back in 1998 when this edition was published, barely a year after its debut?  It must have been a bestseller, (and it claims to be so on the front cover) which is interesting because, well,  we know that not a lot of people have actually read Proust.  I certainly hadn’t back in 1998… I didn’t actually read Proust until the Penguin translation came out and I read the entire thing over about eighteen months in 2004-5, twenty minutes a day on the exercise bike before I went to work.  It took me ages to read, yes, because it’s long, but also because I used to drift off into Proustian reveries (which is not a bad way to stave…