Don Quixote

I learned so much about spinning a good yarn from this book. The characters are fun, dramatic, and clearly flawed. How can anyone resist a half-crazy knight and his chubby sidekick who set out on the roads of Spain to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked (real or imagined)? This novel has served as a blueprint for countless novelists, including me. It stands the test of time. It's hilarious, ironic, historic, and totally captured my imagination.

I was on an extended trip to Eastern Europe, back when Eastern Europe was not such a dandy place to visit, and I found myself with nothing to read. In a used bookstore in Prague, I found a tattered paperback, translated into English, of this next pick. It was falling apart, the pages stained by coffee and God knows what else. I bought it anyway.

And over the next few weeks, I was, for the third time, blown away by words on a page, by an author’s imagination. It’s been said that Don Quixote, written around 1600, was the… show more.

I had John Rutherford’s saucy translation of this book, which had been sitting on my shelf since 2004, before finally picking it up last spring. Having grown up watching the musical on TV, I thought the book might be dull and predictable, but I was astonished to find a story about the perils of story-telling and the pleasures of reading. Even the second part was replotted mid-way by Cervantes to foil his many imitators and forgers.

I now understand why Marx and Engels, themselves a kind of Quixote/Sancho Panza pair, considered this work to be a model for how modern… show more.

Look, you’re often going to feel like life is meaningless. Maybe you’re right. But don’t give up.

Like Quixote, you have the power of your noble heart, and the wealth of your imagination. But you also have your Sancho Paza, to keep you moving practically forward. It all will likely come to a ridiculous end. But that’s okay, so long as you’re laughing at yourself along the way.

It is funny. We’re allowed to be funny. We’re supposed to laugh at ourselves and at each other.

It was a gift, a 2-inch thick, 5 lb. gift, that I had no interest in reading because everybody has already read it – the first modern “novel,” the best-selling novel of all time, etc., so it sat for years on an end table where it served two functions: it gave the room a literary cachet, and it was also a good coaster for coffee cups and such.

But then for some reason, perhaps guilt, perhaps fate, I flipped it open, read a few lines, and then laughed. I was hooked. It was fantastic, funny, and timeless – not just… show more.

There had to be a choice between this and my other favourite grand classic, Moby Dick, but for me, Cervantes just pips Melville to the post for his sheer, unutterably heartwarming and forgiving consideration of human nature. It's extraordinary how this 400+ year–old novel, one of the very first 'modern' novels has stood the test of time so resiliently, and the answer to that lies, I think in its absolute universality. We can all recognise parts of ourselves in the knight of the sorrowful countenance and his equally heroic squire, Sancho Panza because they are aspects of the same… show more.