Combray by Marcel Proust, the first text I have ever encountered of such a descriptive, narrative nature. I found the book especially hard to consume due to, what I found to be, increasingly complicated and elaborate descriptions of the world. This took form in the shape of extremely long sentences, heavy use of adjectives and extreme world building. These characteristics made it especially hard for me to maintain my focus on the book, therefore I had to read over the same part multiple times and various parts to understand and reorient myself in terms of the story. This created a sense of urgency in the text for me, where I felt as if the slightest of breaks would make me completely lose my sense of context in the story. However, this type of narration also helped immerse me in the idea of these descriptions being the ramblings of someone describing their memories. Although this is what makes this reading exceedingly hard, I found the ability of the author to elicit the emotion that one experiences when listening to their friend go on and on about a dream they had, this sense of organized chaos/misconstrued coherency, in my opinion, to be one of the most important and innovative aspects of the book and the type of narration it entails. Ironically, the narration at the beginning of the chapter, where the narrator describes the confused state he wakes up in, perfectly encapsulates what one feels while reading this text for the first time. Overall, I found this text to be extremely interesting in terms of, how the author depicts what can now be considered a rather overdone theme of memories. This text approaches it from a unique perspective of self-awareness, with grandiose descriptions, and extreme care and attention to the contextualization and world building. The highlight of this text for me was the undeniable evidence of Proust’s mastery over the medium. His use of extravagant verbiage and elaborate descriptions, although confusing and complex, ultimately paint a picture and immerse the reader in the story’s world uniquely.