Whew. I did it. I'm ready to run the New York Marathon, climb Mount Everest, swim the Mekong River, and hunt the nefarious arctic narwhale, now that I've read Don Quixote in its entirety. And I am truly a better person for it.
It would be impossible to write a comprehensive book review of this book without writing a book myself, so I think I'll just comment randomly:
Especially in the second book, I wasn't sure what to think of the "royalty" DQ and Poncho ran into along their merry way. Either the irony was too subtle for my radar, or Cervantes seemed to be in on the arrogant, mean-spirited, sadistic jokes the landed gentry played on the deluded duo. Some of the jokes (the flying horse, for example) were laugh-out-loud funny, but some were just, well, wrong (Altisodora's feigned love for Quixote, practically starving Sancho after giving him his insula governorship). And then some, like the 3000 lashes Sancho had to give his own sweaty buttocks to make Dulcinea pretty again, were both, but mainly because of Sancho's ingenious ways of avoiding delivering the lashes.
The ending really sucked. The episodic nature of the novel I guess prevents any climactic closure, but without giving anything away, Cervantes ends the novel so apologetically that he seems to go ideologically against every previous chapter. I would have stopped reading with ten pages to go if it hadn't been such a long trip to the end.
To my pleasure, the novel was much more violent overall than I expected. If you took out and strung together all the lumps, cuts, bruises, tramplings, beatings, and lashes Quixote and Sancho took it would rival The Passion of the Christ. And be a hundred times more enjoyable.
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Don Quixote Books In Print, Audio Books.