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…
Don Quixote is a very deceiving book if you don't understand its true nature. Looks like a sad and depressing history, but in fact Is a savage and dark parody.
The book is linked to a culture, an age and a landscape. We are probably unable to grasp a lot of references in a book written thousands of years before, so is a little like in the Simpsons, that small children don't enjoy so much (by lack of context) as adults do.
The author is a mutilated ex-soldier that has seen enough of the war to feel cynical about warmongers. He as a poor writer trying to struggle, probably envied the success of cheap literature and "pulp" histories from this age. The book is his personal revenge against the "undeserved winners". Specially against dilapidated nobility craving for adventures and glory and dragging lower classes to feed their wars and crazy campaigns and die for the cause.
To write a book criticizing the wars wouldn't be wise. Kings do the war, but he can target the nobility that thinks that is somebody but don't have any experience with war, working, women or the real life. And here comes the nerd.
Quixote is basically a grown man so obsessed by superhero comics and so clueless about society that one day starts driving around the neighborhood disguised as batman and searching for crimes in his bicycle. The problem is that he hasn't any money, talent or fighting skills, so the results are entirely predictable. Some people would find it hilarious, for other it hits too close to home and is not funny at all.
You shouldn't like Don Quixote, is just a crash test dummy, a freak and an idiot for most of the book. But if you meet personally somebody that fits in the stereotype, now you can enjoy each time he hits the ground, chooses the wrong option, and each time "a piano falls in his head".