Jumping back into the thread after an absence that was much longer than I meant it to be. @Terpsichore, I’m so impressed that you’re reading the whole of Proust. In fact Proust is to blame for a lot of my exhaustion this term. I had to teach him for the first time ever because a colleague is on leave, and it was so much more labour-intensive than I expected. It’s not my period of expertise at all, and it took hours and hours for me just to get through the assigned text, which was Combray (the first third of the first novel) before I even got started on the secondary criticism. It was like reading a very long prose poem. It’s the kind of book that you need to read at a patient and leisurely pace, and wasn’t at all conducive to the breakneck rhythm of term time. (Yes, I know! I should have started it earlier! And read Proust instead of slacking off with the Women’s Prize longlist!) At least I was only teaching the text to first years (so we were doing a kind of focused analysis of the language rather than a broader exploration of the cultural/historical period), and the students had lectures by a proper Proust scholar, which I most emphatically am not. 
I complained so much at home that at one point I had DH and the DC asking me every day, ‘Are you done teaching Proust yet?’ 
And the irony is that my uni is taking Proust off the first-year syllabus after this, so I may well never teach him again. Not even sure I can count my hours and hours of reading as a finished book for the purposes of this thread, because it wasn’t even a whole book.
Anyway, there were moments when Combray did amaze and delight me, but I won’t be rushing out to read the whole of La Recherche any day soon. Terpsichore said in her review, the eponymous narrator, having cherished a love from afar for the aristocratic Duchesse de Guermantes, without ever having actually met her (an unfortunate and now very recognisable character trait of his), finally does meet her and becomes part of her circle, just as his adoration fades. I did laugh at this, because OMG yes, this character trait is already hugely present in Combray. Whether it’s the Duchesse de Guermantes or Swann’s daughter, the narrator spends so long creating fantasies about them in his head that when he actually meets them, it’s a bit of an annoying distraction for him really. Not that that seems to deter him. The students and I talked about how, when these women turn out not to conform to the mental images he’s constructed of them, he doesn’t move from imagination to reality – instead he just reconfigures his fantasy, so that they are playing a new and different role in his imagination. (Sample essay title: ‘In Combray, imagination is not an escape from the world, it is the world.’ Discuss.)
@Tarahumara, I LOVE Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living. Have been trying to get my book group to read it for ages (no success yet). I like her novels too, but like you I enjoyed the memoirs even more. The third volume Real Estate has just come out, I think, and I’ve put in a request for it at the library. I really like the way she mingles literary references with lots of concrete everyday detail and humour about her own experiences – she has a very distinctive voice. She seems like the kind of woman who would be great to have as a friend in real life.
Very interesting conversation between Cote and LadybirdDaphne about gender and women acting compliant so as not to frighten men (I know I’m paraphrasing here!). It reminded me of a famous article by the early woman psychoanalysis Joan Riviere, called ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ (1929). She argues that especially when women enter male-dominated professions, they often exaggerate ‘feminine’ behaviours in order to reassure the men around them. However, she goes a step further as well, and argues that there is no essential difference between ‘being’ a woman and ‘masquerading’ as a woman – ultimately they are the same thing. I think part of the idea here is that women behave in ‘feminine’ ways unconsciously to a degree, because they know it will put the people around them at ease. Looking back at my own career, I can see that I did a lot of that myself, especially early on. I’m more aware of it now and try to be less people-pleasing in general (not just around male academics!). I’m not sure whether it’s nature or nurture, I suspect it’s more the latter, but women are certainly conditioned to do it.
@elkidee, I vaguely remember one MNer, who was a teacher, telling a story about how her students had written a letter to Susan Hill to tell her they felt dissatisfied with the ending of The Woman in Black, and she sent a very grumpy reply, essentially saying they were too thick to understand her genius. I’m not a big fan of her myself.
EineReise, I’m actually reading What’s Left of Me Is Yours right now and struggling to finish it. The Japanese setting is interesting, but like you, the romance is leaving me cold.