After I finished Treasure Island via email (from dailylit.com), it was my intention to subscribe to Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, but when I searched for the title one of the results was Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (aka these days as In Search of Lost Time).

What the hey, I thought, why not?

And then I also had on hand a nice Easton Press edition of The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. (You know the Easton Press: they’re the ones who have gone to great lengths to bind the Classics in Leather with Silk Endpapers, etc., etc. This volume is actually nice, so their advertising is truthful.)

What the hey, I thought, why not?

Why not tackle two of the most abstruse and impenetrable books at the same time? To make it the more gracious, peradventure, I calculated the number of days that dailylit.com will take to send me all the installments of Swann’s Way, and then calculated the number of pages per day it will take to finish Tristram Shandy in the same length of time. Fortunately, it was only nine pages a day.

So far it’s had a curious frisson: slogging through the fuzzy musings of Western Civilization’s biggest mooncalf while at the same time untangling the convoluted snark of the first postmodern novel.

If I have any actual insights, I’ll post them.