Dave Patten says Proust’s In Search of Lost Time was unreadable (Letters 22 May). When I was a student of French in the 1970s I attempted to read it in French, but gave up after volume one. The only person I knew who had read it all in the original French was one of our lecturers who told us he had done it to pass the time one long summer vacation when he was laid up with gout. À chacun son gout, I suppose.
Ian Arnott
Peterborough
• I got no further than the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. It is surely no coincidence that the widely quoted incident with the madeleines occurs in that volume. Does anything of note happen later?
Mike Bromberg
Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire
• My grandad claimed to have never read a book in his life. As a widower in his late 80s and living with us, he decided he had to put this right and began reading. But what to start with? Visiting a library for the first time, he decided to base his choice of novel on the book that had been stamped out for loan most frequently, as surely it would be the best. He returned home with Ulysses by James Joyce. He read the first page and returned it the next day, deciding that he had not really missed out and never went again.
Andrew Keeley
Stockton Heath, Warrington
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