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I finally finished Don Quixote by Cervantes for the first time ever, a 1,000-plus page tome, and I thought it was great. Some of the side stories that don't involve Quixote or Sancho Panza are just as good: "The Ill-Advised Curiosity," Cardenio's story, Marcela's speech about Chrysostom, and some additional critiques of the plays and writings of other authors of his time. In Part II, Cervantes employs a clever plot device in regard to how people come to know the knight-errant and his squire; it's almost like they're celebrities, in a sense, and this is interwoven in more complex ways than I will spoil here. He further uses Part II to wryly address critics of Part I while praising its successes through various sub-stories. I will say that Quixote's bloviating about chivalry can get a little tedious, which I think is kind of the point - his reading of books on chivalry are the reason for his madness - and there were some instances in Part II that felt somewhat rushed or glossed over, but not overly so in a detracting way. I learned through the footnotes and later from web searching that Cervantes only had one hand, interestingly enough.
I am starting two books concurrently: The Substitution Order: A Novel by Martin Clark, a former Virginia circuit court judge, and The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris.
Thanks for this! I read Part I and then took a break before I bury myself in Part II. That will be soon. I really appreciate your details about Part II. I loved Part I and Part II sounds just as good in its own way.
The Substitution Order. I haven't finished it and the author is annoying me trying to prove how clever he is. Still, it's readable so far, but I like to be dying to get back to my book and with this one I'm not really.
"THE HATEFUL CAT" a very disturbing horror novel by Slade Hornet. It's really quite scary.
Before that (last week) I read "African-American Near Death Experiences" by Dr. Lloyd Rudy and that was
excellent even though it was a little insulting to White people IMO. But overall an excellent read.
I just started Dandelion Wine. Never read it before and I thought it was mentioned here but doing a search I see nothing recent. Anyway must have been mentioned on a different forum and I realized I have always heard of it and never read it. Hope it's a good one! On a positive note, it's not a long book so there's that!
This was a 3 star read for me, (but I'm not a super fan of memoirs).
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