Proust! (maybe)

Just finished the first thing that has ever made me want to have a crack at actually reading Proust, a biography of Proust's first English translator, C.K. Scott Moncrieff that I picked up randomly in a bookshop while escaping from the cold on a recent trip to Seattle. Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff, by Jean Findlay (his I think great niece) is not the best written biography I've read by a long shot, and Scott Moncrieff is not even (as Adam Gopnik points out in his much more articulate discussion of Scott Montcrieff's translation of Proust: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-a-flawed-version-of-proust-became-a-classic-in-english) the most remarkable of men, but it's rather lovely to read - even posthumously - about someone who was such patently good company. Despite the backdrop of trench warfare, the rise of Italian fascism, and eventual excruciating death by esophageal cancer, he was cheerful, affectionate, funny, brave, interested and tenacious in his translation work, devoted to his fellow soldiers in the trenches as well as to friends and family, irreverent, soulful, schoolboyishly dirty-minded... altogether a very endearing portrait. You have to love a man who likes to write letters and read as much as he did.
Speaking of cheerful grace in adversity, on the same fruitful bookshop visit, I also treated myself to Anne Lamotte's book on how to write, Bird by Bird, which did not remotely inspire me to try and write anything fictional ever (it would have been a tough sell in any case) but did make me giggle out loud enough times to seriously annoy my partner (who was trying to work), especially her descriptions of parenthood (the image of babies being born with one-fifth of their mothers' brains clutched in their fist, like the babies you read about being born clutching their mother's IUD, made me shed tears of recognizing joy).
And (guilty pleasure) three of Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael books... When you read three in a row without stopping (on the plane back from Seattle), certain formulae do start to emerge in terms of plot and character, but they are still fun fun fun and you can convince yourself that you are learning at least a little bit of legitimate history. I did start to wonder a bit what the trick is with her dialogue - it's sort of timelessly old-fashioned. If she were to write in actual 12th century English, it would be unintelligible, but paragraphs like:
 "The truth will be known in the end. Since you certainly did not kill [ ], there's somewhere among us a man who did, and whoever uncovers his name removes the shadow from yours. If, indeed, there is anyone who truly believes you guilty"
- have a generically Tolkieny sound to them - quaint, but not pinnable down to any particular half century. You do have to admire, however, her casual use of words like paynim, Outremer, castellan, missal, merlon, embrasure, mangonel, brattice, espringale... (true confessions: the only ones I would have even had half a chance at guessing were paynim and missal, but I was glad to be able to do that guessing in the privacy of my own brain, rather than in front of a panel of judges).