“Don Quixote” as a manual for living

“Don Quixote” as a manual for living
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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 a pretty fun read.

It's certainly interesting as a cultural artifact. If you wanted to buy a book explaining the Don Quixote craze, how it introduced parody characters to the mainstream, that would be an interesting book.

And I have nothing against Miguel de Cervantes. My gripe is with the people who recommend this book because it was required reading for their literature major, next to Moby Dick and Shakespeare.

Part of me thinks it's so celebrated because it's such a big book. It's like some kind of weird d*ck measuring contest if you want to seem cultured and learned.

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.

It wasn't 100% bad. There are moments where it's redeeming, but it doesn't live up to the hype; it doesn't even live up to being average.

I strongly recommend people with a sense of taste do anything else with their life. Like if you're not part of the literature cognoscenti and don't mundanely read something just because it's assigned to you, skip this book.

You can literally do anything else and it would be more interesting. Watch paint dry and snails race. You can use Don Quixote as a door stop.

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 and the political context aren’t particularly present to the modern reader. Even though the book is pioneering and inventive, so were early computers that filled rooms; yet, outside of their novelty and significance, they would bore anyone with a smartphone.

I guess if you don't get it, you don't get it. Maybe you had an old translation? Hmm no, I wasn't just pretending to enjoy it! I'm not sure why you read the whole thing if you didn't enjoy any of it?! That's a bit weird.

(Not a literature major! I almost never read fiction, but I had a "great novels" period in my early 20s when I read some famous classics - Quixote, Jane Eyre, Mill on the Floss, Great Expectations etc, and really loved them all. Well ok, I was into Shakespeare, Keats, Coleridge etc for a while too before that.)

I'm not immediately convinced that Don Quixote is a more effective manual for living than other classic works of literature, but it's interesting enough to make me consider a reread. I'm sure it would be a completely new experience.