Reading Proust is completely worth the effort. I read the first two volumes (hope to read the last 4 at some point). While they do take a lot of time and effort to read, your life will be changed. Proust verbalizes things that you thought or knew about your own life but never recognized because you could not put them into words yourself. It is a novel about life, art, and the evolution of time. If you have ever felt saddened by the passing of time, you will enjoy Proust.
Additionally, if you enjoy music, it will please you to discover that Proust writes a lot about music. One of the major themes of the first volume is a piano sonata that comes to mean various things to the characters as they progress through time.
The other thing Proust is really famous for is his metaphors. Nowhere else will you find such extended, unexpected, and surprising metaphors, generated from nearly all topics of the text.