This is the second time I've read Don Quixote. This year I read it over a three month span, picking it up whenever I felt like it.
Don Quixote is a character who read so many books that he went insane. I am a compulsive and obsessive reader, I've been that way for most of my life. This is the kind of life I want and choose to live, but I do get depressed about it sometimes. Maybe I've spent too much time with my nose stuck in a book. Maybe my life would be 'better' and healthier and more socially adjusted and successful if I had moderated my reading a little bit more. I start to wonder about what books have added to my life, and what they've taken away.
Don Quixote is a bittersweet kind of hero. He's a comically delusional old man who thinks he is one of the world's great heroes, although he winds up getting humiliated and beaten up and laughed out of town half the time. He is essentially homeless and destitute. Especially in Book One, he is a pathetic character, a warning against the dangers of keeping your head too high in the clouds.
Despite all that, Don Quixote actually does become one of world's great heroes. He has a steadfast idealism, an earnestness, and a chivalric code that he lives for completely. He is not a practical human being, he is a human who dreams himself into a legend. By Book Two, he is known all throughout Spain. He has traveled all over the country and had a hundred fantastic adventures. He knows things that ordinary people will never know. And he completely doesn't give a fuck what other people think of him. He is brave and wild. I love this book like a family member. (excerpt)
