It took me about 20 years to finish Proust, and it did change my life. For the better. Some thoughts:

- Despite what others here have said, it's not "a series." It's one book, with many volumes.

- He didn't write it because he was bed ridden and "had a lot of free time on his hands."

- Alain de Botton's book (to paraphrase some comments here about Proust) "goes downhill" after the title page. It's shallow and condescending, imho, and a much better read is the recent book by Christopher Prendergast called (I think) Living and Dying with Marcel Proust. But it has "spoilers."

- About spoilers. I think the two main things that make Proust most worthy and possible to finish (other than the writing itself, which can be tough to navigate at times) are:

1. It's not about the plot. "What happens" almost doesn't really matter at all, because it's a novel of ideas and concepts, and things "happen" to serve a single purpose: to convey the author's observations about these ideas. Not to tell a conventional story with a 3-act structure or something normal.

2. Foremost among these ideas of Proust is that there are two kinds of memories: voluntary memories, where we try to recall something, intentionally; and involuntary memories, where something from the past comes flooding back to you unexpectedly, triggered by some stimulus (that's the madeleine thing in Swann's Way).

- There is a comment in this thread about how the last volumes must have been rushed because he was ill, so they don't hold together as well. He actually wrote most of the last volumes FIRST, and then went back and wrote Swann's Way in full and published it, before continuing, jumping around to fill in the gaps in the other volumes (but the whole thing was not quite fully "done" when he died, and much of it was put together by his editors from his notebooks and typescripts).

- If you want some amazing descriptions of how he lived and worked, read M. Proust by Celeste Albaret, his longtime house maid.

Finally, someone said below that volumes 5 and 6 were a "slog" because of "too much obsessing about Albertine." This is really interesting, because on one level, the entire 3,000 page, 2,000 character, seven volume book is a rumination on the causes and results of exactly that obsessing. That's kind of the whole point, I think.

Anyway, take your time, and remember one last thing: Every single thing in the book, every detail, every painfully extensive description of the color of the leaves on a hawthorn tree at a certain time of day, is there for a reason. There is not one wasted word. Not one. It's one of the great artistic accomplishments of all time.