Holderness

Don Quixote

   I am well aware that one must not deny that Don Quixote is one of the world's great books, but I can't help it. It seemed stupid, scattered, aimless, random. No doubt it's a cultural thing, but reading it without making allowances for cultural differences or giving credit for being such an early or even the first of its type, I found it silly and nonsensical. I think Cervantes was just churning out text as fast as he could, with no vision of where it was going with it, solely to make money. He had an interestingly varied life, mostly characterized by not enough money, and writing was how he found he could make it. He wrote the second book, which is very different from the first, mainly because if he didn't, someone else was going to (had already started), and he killed off Don Quixote so others couldn't use him. The one coherent point throughout the book, that the romantic novels of chivalry were idiotic and unreal, could have been made far more efficiently; he was beating a dead horse for most of the book.