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“Don Quixote” as a manual for living

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Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#41

Post by jacobolus »

khazhoux wrote: post #24

Don Quixote in Spanish households is like Gödel, Escher, Bach for techies. You bought it when you were young, it sits proudly on your bookshelf, you talk about how meaningful it was... but you've only read a chapter or two. (c'mon, you gonna pretend you really read the entire GEB on the bookshelf behind you right now?)

> pretend you really read the entire GEB

Seriously? This is a book that is plenty accessible for high school students, and not outrageously long or notably archaic.

If you want an English-language analogy stick to something like Canterbury Tales or Moby Dick or Ulysses or Infinite Jest.

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#42

Post by UncleOxidant »

khazhoux wrote: post #24

Don Quixote in Spanish households is like Gödel, Escher, Bach for techies. You bought it when you were young, it sits proudly on your bookshelf, you talk about how meaningful it was... but you've only read a chapter or two. (c'mon, you gonna pretend you really read the entire GEB on the bookshelf behind you right now?)

I've taken 3 runs at GEB each time getting a bit further than the last. It's been about 15 years since the last attempt, I think I should give it a go again soon, I think I'm readier for it now than I was in the past.

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#43

Post by colechristensen »

lostlogin wrote: post #22
colechristensen wrote: post #12

If the length is imposing to you (which it generally is), it’s good to know that what you get is almost always two separate works published ten years apart together as part one and part two. Part 1 is relatively short and hilarious and can be very much read and enjoyed on its own. It is perhaps easier to get tired of the style in part two. It also matters which translation you read.

> It also matters which translation you read. Have you got a recommendation?

Edith Grossman

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#45

Post by ctdonath »

I’ll have to take on DQ again with this perspective.

Now, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - that is a manual for living. Many quotes are words to abide by. “Where it is objectively inaccurate, the Guide strives to be definitively inaccurate.” “We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!” “Who can rule, when nobody who wants to rule can be allowed to?” etc. The raging absurdities are fantastically insightful.

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#46

Post by poopypoopington »

jacobolus wrote: post #41
khazhoux wrote: post #24

Don Quixote in Spanish households is like Gödel, Escher, Bach for techies. You bought it when you were young, it sits proudly on your bookshelf, you talk about how meaningful it was... but you've only read a chapter or two. (c'mon, you gonna pretend you really read the entire GEB on the bookshelf behind you right now?)

> pretend you really read the entire GEB Seriously? This is a book that is plenty accessible for high school students, and not outrageously long or notably archaic. If you want an English-language analogy stick to something like Canterbury Tales or Moby Dick or Ulysses or Infinite Jest .

We read Moby Dick in high school

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#47

Post by [deleted] »

poopypoopington wrote: post #46
jacobolus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pretend you really read the entire GEB Seriously? This is a book that is plenty accessible for high school students, and not outrageously long or notably archaic. If you want an English-language analogy stick to something like Canterbury Tales or Moby Dick or Ulysses or Infinite Jest .

We read Moby Dick in high school

[deleted]

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#48

Post by strken »

blairbeckwith wrote: post #4
DantesKite wrote: post #3

The only people who praise this book are literature majors. It was a disappointment from beginning to end. I couldn't understand why people thought it was so great. It didn't feel like an epic. Maybe for its time it was fun to read, but you really have to be deprived of all stimuli to enjoy it (unless you're a literature professor who has to read it). Like maybe stay in a prison cell for a few months. Then yea, it's…

This is almost certainly an example of the Seinfeld Is Unfunny trope[1], where older things seem boring and lame today, because the state of the art has moved forward so much, even though they were completely groundbreaking and genre defining when they came out. [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...

I was alive and of young TV-watching age when Seinfeld was still running. I hated it then, and I still don't like it now. Sometimes things the rest of the world loves just don't grab us.

My favourite book is the Count of Monte Cristo, but I couldn't finish the Three Musketeers, to give another example. Same author, same era, but one grabbed me and the other didn't.

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#49

Post by jacobolus »

katzgrau wrote: post #33
khazhoux wrote: post #24

Don Quixote in Spanish households is like Gödel, Escher, Bach for techies. You bought it when you were young, it sits proudly on your bookshelf, you talk about how meaningful it was... but you've only read a chapter or two. (c'mon, you gonna pretend you really read the entire GEB on the bookshelf behind you right now?)

I have Knuth's TACP sitting proudly on my bookshelf and ... I flipped through it a couple of times thinking, wow, I'm never going to read this am I.

You should just pick a random section and start reading; or better still find a section relevant to something you have worked with before. Knuth is a clear writer and pretty funny, and there is a lot of great insight packed in there.

Note that TAOCP is more a reference book for professional researchers than a book to skim quickly cover-to-cover.

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#50

Post by chefandy »

katzgrau wrote: post #33
khazhoux wrote: post #24

Don Quixote in Spanish households is like Gödel, Escher, Bach for techies. You bought it when you were young, it sits proudly on your bookshelf, you talk about how meaningful it was... but you've only read a chapter or two. (c'mon, you gonna pretend you really read the entire GEB on the bookshelf behind you right now?)

I have Knuth's TACP sitting proudly on my bookshelf and ... I flipped through it a couple of times thinking, wow, I'm never going to read this am I.

Yeah— that's one of those tomes that takes a superhuman amount of will for most people to push through if they're not being compelled by university course work. Very well-written but it's just a lot of information to absorb.

When I was a teenager, just before I started more seriously getting into programming on the school computers, a Russian friend asked his dad— a soviet university trained software engineer— how he could learn to code. His dad handed him a his stack of Knuth and said "read that and then get back to me."

Of course, the kid read 10 pages of Fundamental Algorithms, put the book down, and never tried to learn how to code ever again. Why would he have? As far as he was concerned, the very first steps were a big pile of confusing theory that wasn't bringing him closer to his goal of doing some fun projects with a computer at any point in the near future. He had to absorb all that just to start? Forget it.

Looking back, I think his dad probably thought it was funny and probably even joked with his coworkers about it... but I wonder how different my friend's path would have been if his dad handed him a copy of Learning Perl (it was the mid 90s) and helped him get ActivePerl installed on his machine. If your nerd machismo is so intense that you're alienating your own teen kid with it, you really need to reconsider your life strategy.

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