I’ve also read other “Classic” literature. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe and truly enjoyed them. I decided it was time to exercise my brain a bit and make an intentional effort to plow through some of the most recommend classic novels of all time. Tops on a couple of lists I inspected, as well as a work that is listed as the earliest (or at least one of the foundational) novels written, the Spanish work Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miquel Cervantes. The book is actually two books written ten years apart and close to 1000 pages. Feeling optimistic, I checked out Don Quixote and The Brothers Karamazov. Should be able to polish those two off in a month before they were due back. Famous last words.

Don Quixote is a comedy. And I laughed along with it. The story follows the character Alonso Quixano, a middle-class landowner in rural Spain, who, due to his obsession with reading the books of knight errantry and chivalry of old, descends into madness and believes that he is actually Don Quixote de la Mancha, a knight errant. He makes up his true love (the Lady Dulcinea del Toboso) to whom he pledges his life and takes for himself a squire, the country bumpkin Sancho Panza.

Don Quixote (DQ) then sets off on a journey where every inn is a castle, every windmill a giant, and every person he meets a new adventure to investigate. Remarkably, the (presumably) sane squire Sancho goes along with everything that happens-partly because he is “not versed in the ways of knight errantry” and partly (mostly?) because DQ has promised him governorship of an isle for his faithfulness. When things do not turn out as they should, or others who recognize their insanity play jokes on them, it is chalked up to “enchanters.” Eventually, the Don and his squire return home, badly beaten and bruised from their adventures, and cared for by DQ’s niece, housekeeper, and the village priest and barber. This ends book one.

Between the 10 years that Cervantes wrote his two books, someone else wrote a sequel to the first Don Quixote story. Cervantes rips into him in his prologue, and makes both the original book and the unauthorized sequel part of the plot in his sequel to the first book. It makes for an interesting device, as the characters who DQ and Sancho meet on their second set of adventures have actually heard about them from the original story (you follow all that?).

So the second half of the story begins with DQ and Sancho recovering and planning their escape from DQ’s niece and housekeeper. After they get out they come upon all sorts of characters who have know who he is from the first book-and that he is a complete lunatic. They do all sorts of practical jokes on him…and this is where the story got kind of slow for me. You see, I’ve always loved to read. When I was 5 I would stay up at night with a flashlight and my mom would have to tell me to go to sleep. This is actually still what happens, except it’s a headlamp and my wife telling me to go to sleep. But around this point in the story, I actually began reading at night to fall asleep. It also led me to be well over a month overdue on returning the book. Reading became work as I attempted to overcome the giant in front of me (hey, if windmills can be giants, so can books).

Finally, however, the story picked back up when DQ and Sancho were taken in by a Duke and Duchess (who were big DQ and Sancho fans) and played all sorts of tricks on them. Sancho becomes (a quite excellent) governor of an isle-though only for a short time-and DQ waits for the disenchantment of his fair Lady, Dulcinea del Toboso. Eventually DQ is bested in a jousting match by a friend from home (though DQ was unaware), on which the conditions where to go home and give up knight errantry for a year. On the way home DQ and Sancho decide they shall become shepherds for the next year and shortly thereafter, the story ends.

This book is a comedy, and the dialog between DQ and Sancho, as well as these two characters and the normal people they come into contact with is extremely humorous. Cervantes also does a good job of character development while introducing several different episodes into the storyline (think of a serialized TV drama-each show is its own story, but the characters develop throughout, even though some plot lines do not reoccur at all after they are introduced and ended). Anyway, it was truly work to finish this book, but one well worth it. I need a break from the classics for a bit, but The Brothers K is next on the list.

4 out of 5 stars

I stumbled upon an intriguing website a few weeks back: LibraryThing.com. Basically, the website is social networking for book readers. After registering an account, you add all the books you own (or have ever read) into your catalog. Then LibraryThing can show you other users’ profiles who have the same books in their catalog. You can browse their catalog and see what they thought about the books you have read, or even get ideas for new books to read from like-minded readers. A pretty nifty concept that is extremely well done.

First, creating an account is free* and easy: to register all you need is a user name and password…they don’t even need an email address (though if you want to retrieve your password, you should add it to your profile). After registering you are ready to add books to your catalog. To do this, you just search for the title or author of the book, and LibraryThing searches Amazon.com’s website for the book in question. I have always found the book I’ve been looking for. Just in case, though, you can search more than 80 different libraries for the book, including the Library of Congress.

*Free membership is limited to 200 books, a lifetime unlimited membership is a mere $25.

After adding books to your catalog, you are ready to begin the addicting part: arranging them on the shelves. There are a plethora of options once a book is added, including changing the cover image to the one that you have, tagging the book with keywords to easily sort and search your collection, rating the books on a scale of 0-5, and entering a review of the book for others to see, or perhaps for your own recollection. The process can sometimes be tedious, but is also very addicting. In fact, I’m only writing about this now because LibraryThing.com is down for a couple hours for scheduled maintenance. I still have about 200 books to tag and organize.

Another feature LibraryThing offers is a range of different book suggestion options. They can look at what books you have and see what other people who liked those books also have (sorted by fiction or non-fiction, and including authors you have read or completely new ones). They also have an interesting suggester called the “Unsuggester”-this allows you to put in a book you hated and it will give a recommendation that it thinks you will love (or vice-versa, I suppose). There is also a handy feature to display random books from your library on your website or blog. Mine is located on the right of our website…clicking the book takes you to Amazon, clicking “my library” takes you to my catalog.

All in all, I think this service is a blast and I thought it entirely appropriate to break out a new category of posts, curiously named “Cheese.” These are reviews in which I rate certain products, companies, services, and ideas by giving them between 0-5 “cheese” based on usefulness, fun, mood and other arbitrary criteria. I am please to rate my inaugural review a solid 4.5 out of 5. Well done, LibraryThing.com

4.5 out of 5 stars