Day One Hundred and Forty-Three
Don Quixote of the Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Page: 247Â Finished
This was Cervantes for kids but it was still pretty depressing. I don’t imagine a young child would pick up on the appalling sadness of it but I don’t think it would have been my favorite book if I’d read it as a child.
Cervantes got me talking to a customer about reading long, dense novels and I mentioned reading War & Peace as a teenager and he thought it incredulous that I believed I’d understood it. Of course I’ve read it and read about it since so I can’t be entirely certain how many of my current thoughts about Tolstoy stem from subsequent readings and yet I imagine that I “got” quite a bit of it back then. Is that vanity?