Re-reading Books

I love to read novels, but I find it very difficult to re-read them. The first time I read a good book, I'm captivated. Whenever I'm away from a book  I'm reading for the first time, I can't wait to get back into the world of the story. But when I'm re-reading, it takes some work to get drawn into it that way. 

Right now I'm re-reading  In Search of Lost Time, and it is harder to read than it was the first time, but I am finding new things in it. Like this quote, about a stand of trees that remind the narrator of something he can't place:

 "I could not manage to recognize the place they had, as it were, been separated from... and I had to ask myself whether this whole outing were not just some figment, Balbec merely a place where I might once have been in my imagination, Mme de Villiparisis someone out of a novel, and the three old trees nothing but the solid reality that meets the eye of the reader who glances up from a book, his mind still held by the spell of a fictional setting." 

Which is more real, a well-written novel, or real life?