Books I Read December 22nd, 2025

Just spent the week plowing through Proust and buying nice smelling things for people for Christmas. It turns out that about half the stores in my neighborhood sell nice smelling things, so that's been really helpful. Even the stores that aren't exclusively devoted to selling nice smelling things usually have a few nice smelling things they will sell you, potpourri or candles or incense or fresh sage or hand-made soap or lavender sachets. In any event—Merry Christmas if I don't speak to you before then.

The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust – The third volume of Proust's masterpiece is a savage, not altogether subtle satire of the salons of the Belle Epoque, of the absurd pretensions of the cultural elite and the grasping desperateness of their social inferiors, with the meta-gag being that there is no distinction between any of them, that everyone's standards are based upon constantly shifting mores with self-interest being the only constant. As always, Proust's social insights are frequent and sharp, but I confess there were periods of the book where I was thinking 'I hate all of these people, so why am I reading so much about them?' Proust clearly wondered something similar. It left me wishing a bit that he had turned his extraordinary genius for psychological insight on a group of people more interesting than his cast of vacuous beauties, status-obsessed 'inverts,' pedantic intellectuals, desperate artists and monstrous narcissists. The first bit, about the sudden death of his grandmother, however, is utterly magnificent.

Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust – In the fourth volume of Proust's masterpiece our protagonist sketches the homosexual demimonde while growing obsessed with the loosely drawn Albertine. His insight into the complex world of male-to-male relations is sad and fascinating, filled with rich insight into the tortured existence of a maligned subclass. Everything about lesbians, however, is kinda weird. I suppose it's not shocking that Proust would have been more familiar with Sodom's side streets than it's neighboring metropolis. That said, and as always in Proust, moments of sublime beauty are intermixed with the most cogent social insight, and in general this has been a really fun project.