61–70 of 89 posts
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?)
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?)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Its funny that the author puts down the play, The Man of La Mancha, while describing the importance of the text. The play is elegant and created great works of its own like “The impossible dream” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impossible_Dream_(The_Ques... ) which I would argue distills of the most poignant points about living a good life. Honestly, I barely remember Don Quixote but the lyrics to the Impossible…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
or high school lit class
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For my own enjoyment I have however seen that the translation that I use is really important. I'm reading it in German, and the new translation by Susanne Lange is much more pleasant to read than some other older translation I have in digital form.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
This reads like a non-sequitur. OP pointed out that your summary of Don Quixote clearly shows you failed to understand the book at all, thus you're criticizing it out of ignorance. Hence the comparison of your summary with claiming that Moby Dick is a story of a guy who hates whales.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
“Am I so out of touch? No, it is the 400 years of readers who are wrong.” People may think your take is snarky but it’s very good actually. Classics become classic because they are beloved, not because “literature majors” demand it to be so. No novel has a readership outside of its own century that is not exceptional in some way. They must reach across time and into the universal heart of humanity to communicate so f…
Although I totally agree with you, there's also the meaning that the Classics is just a collection of books people claim to have read but never did.
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…
The Don Quixote we are delivered is usually two books, and I think the first is far superior to the second. Either way, they are two different kinds of books published years apart that we are given as one. Much of the genius of Don Quixote is the satirical take on Chivalric Romances that were popular at the time. He uses tropes from those stories, mocks them, and expands the scope of the narrative. Of course, this an…
I'm not sure you were aware when you wrote that that smartphones are a consumer good which are mindlessly held by people who don't think too much of it, whereas nowadays the only people interested in those computers that filled rooms are those who develop and nurture a deep understanding for the art, understand the technical limitations and challenges, and value them for the technical tour de force their are.
In the past there were people who also valued and devoured penny dreadfuls like crazy. I'm sure penny dreadfuls were the smartphones of their time.