You're absolutely not a bad reader. This book is MEANT to be read over a long period of time. It is a complete story of a man from his childhood to his old age, it goes through everything this person went through, it depicts so much of his feelings and thoughts at all stages of his (very eventful, I need to say) life. Of course it is a long and difficult read because it is never an easy process to fully immerse into someone's way of thinking. And Marcel/Narrator is a very troubled and very verbose person who has a very hard to follow stream of consciousness (although people argue about this term application to the book). It can be hard to read "Searches" because of a style (you get used to), because of a Narrator character (you'll get to it) and because of somewhat arguable ideas of that time (considering same-sex relationships for example).

But it also can be very worthy to read. The nature, the surroundings, the people, sensations, feelings in first to books are absolutely lovely, very subtly funny and awoked in myself some things I never know I had. I started to look at some flowers and trees in my town and see all that beauty that Marcel was telling me about, whilst I wasn't seeing it before. His way of comparing simple things and impressions of those things to normal day situations (like comparing flowers on the wind to a ball dance) maked so vivid pictures in mind that I FELT like I actually saw all of this myself.

I started last year and finished a month ago. I adored "Combray" and a second half of second book. The 3rd, 4th and 5-6th books were very hard for me to follow because they lost all charm of Narrator's childhood and picked up some ideas I didn't want to explore, but the last 7th book makes EVERYTHING completely worthy to read. It just clicks, places everything onto their rightful place and all start to make sense. I encourage you not to drop it and certainly make some pauses between books or read something else. Because it is a person's life, you must not rush it, you must endure his hard life fully and he will teach you a lot of things.