Includes bibliographical references.

First impressions and lasting influences -- Foreign incursions -- Good readers and bad readers -- A homosexual reader: Baron de Charlus -- Racine: a second language -- The Goncourts -- Bergotte: the writer in the novel.

Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometime seems that he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels.