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“Don Quixote” as a manual for living

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Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#51

Post by AlanYx »

yesenadam wrote: post #7
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…

Huh? hehe That's so surprising. I thought it was ridiculously funny. Even the chapter titles are very funny. I understood why it's considered to be so great. Besides being the first modern novel. "It didn't feel like an epic." - uh that makes me think you didn't understand it at all. Quixote himself is into epics, everything about it is the ridiculous opposite of epic. I guess if you don't get it, you don't get it. M…

I found it quite funny too, but the main character has a bit of a 17th century Adam Sandler quality, straddling a line that some readers find more annoying than humorous.

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#52

Post by Haga »

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…

It is a analogy for alot of things (idealist dreamers in combat with analogy) but mostly it is barely veiled critique on society of an older era. I honestly do not see the point of having youth study that..

Every cultural transient work is distilled down into me es by word of mouth eg Gullivers journeys etc. These stay relevant and reused, the rest perishes.

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#53

Post by DantesKite »

Spinnaker_ wrote: post #16
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…

> It felt like one literal crazy dude going on disappointing adventures and then (spoilers) it just ends with him dying, having regretting everything he did, which in my mind, sums up the book pretty well. Ah yes, and Moby Dick is just about a man who really hates a whale and wants to kill it. I never know how to respond to reviews like these. If you actually think that sums up the book pretty well then the problem i…

I quite like Moby Dick. Good book. Shakespeare too.

My problem is with artificial, curated reading lists, rather than something organic that arises out of interest.

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#54

Post by jdblair »

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 did read the whole thing in high school in 1990. I learned to program lisp as a direct result. GEB was one of the more influential books of my late teens, up there with Doors of Perception and The Cuckoo's Egg.

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#55

Post by praptak »

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.

It's an encyclopedia, you aren't supposed to read it cover to cover.

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#56

Post by Shorel »

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 read GEB, it only took a decade and a half.

I have only read about 80 pages of El Quijote.

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#57

Post by DantesKite »

briga wrote: post #20
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…

So is it the 400 years of readers and literary critics who are wrong, or is it you who are wrong? Whether or not you were entertained by it is a matter of personal taste, but declaring that it’s uninteresting suggests that you only gave it a cursory reading. I would also suggest that no one uses Don Quixote as a way to exaggerate their intelligence, it was deliberately written in a way so as to be accessible to the c…

I think it's popular because it was a remarkable book for its time, but like Uncle Tom's Cabin or The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, I wouldn't say it's a fun literary read.

Strong cultural impact? Yes. Riveting novel? No.

You know how academics rack up citation circles to "boost the impact of their publications"?

Literature is a bit like that where you have a small group of people dictating the tastes of others, until it eventually collapses in on itself like a black hole and you're staring at an empty canvas, a banana peel, and an empty can of deodorant and calling it art.

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#58

Post by jdblair »

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.

First reaction: surely there must be a better language to describe algorithms than a made up assembly language.

2nd reaction: holy shit, this is how programmers thought until the 80s.

It is worth working through some of the code until they make sense, but Introduction to Algorithms is much more accessible.

Can't deny the boxes set looks great on a shelf, though.

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#59

Post by DantesKite »

izzydata wrote: post #25
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…

Sounds like some classic elitism. If you don't like it, it is because you don't get it or didn't finish it. Even though you likely didn't finish it because you didn't like it. You see this kind of thing in a lot of different mediums.

Right? If you genuinely enjoyed it, hey, that's great. Not every book is for everyone. Have at it. Everybody's got different tastes.

But to go up there on a pedestal and mark it as one of the great literary achievements of the past 400 years and anybody who disagrees otherwise is a rube...Come on now.

Re: “Don Quixote” as a manual for living

#60

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

chefandy wrote: post #50
katzgrau wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Great story and a cautionary tale for me. That dad sounds like a real asshat.
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