In a small village in La Mancha, Spain, the noble Alonso Quijano has become completely consumed by the stories he’s read of knights and their valiant chivalry and so he imagines himself one of these knight, renames himself Don Quixote, and with his loyal servant Sancho Panza, sets off on a series of (mis)adventures, battling imaginary foes and treating common women as a knight would treat a duchess, all in the name of chivalry.

I have a literary bucket list of classics I’ve been wanting to read and this has been high on my list.  I have been glad that a number of publishers have been reissuing classics (often with new translations) as most of what I read lately are ARCs.

Not having read this before, and really, not knowing as much about it as I thought I did, I was a little surprised by the episodic nature of the book. I was expecting a longer story with a series of mishaps along the way. And while that could be an interpretation of this book, this came across more as a series of adventures loosely bound up in an over-arcing set-up.

I was also surprised at just important Sancho is to the story. In fact, Don Quixote, due to his narrow focus of being gallant and chivalrous, was almost a little dull while Sancho, who sees behind the veneer of Don Quixote’s imagination, and is maybe a little high strung and often fearful as to how things might turn out, provides the color and energy to Quixote’s story.

In fact, there is a time when Sancho leaves to be the ruler of his own domain and the next chapters with Don Quixote (without Sancho) are almost disappointing, while Sancho gets his own story in a chapter or two, and I absolutely loved these!

This translation by John Ormsby is really brilliant. Sometimes when reading a translated book, I can sense a stiffness in the language. That doesn’t happen here.  One might think that this book was originally written in English, just as it appears here.

I’m really glad to have read this and to now have a better understanding of the occasional Don Quixote references I come across in literature, and that my basic understanding of the book is not just based on the musical, Man of La Mancha.

 This is not an easy read.  It’s about 1,000 pages, small print, and still has a style that was popular hundreds of years ago and is not swift in action. A single paragraph can run for pages and a simple object might take multiple paragraphs to describe.

It is interesting how important a translation of a famous work can be. I’ve started to read this book before but never made it past the first five chapters before being too bored with it.  This time my attention was held (it took me months to finish, but I did stick with it).

Looking for a good book? Anyone who likes to read should have Don Quixote by Cervantes on their ‘to be read’ list, and this particular version, with translation by John Ormsby, is perfect for the modern reading audience.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.

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Don Quixote

author: Cervantes

translator: John Ormsby

publisher: Restless Books

ISBN: 1632060752

paperback, 960 pages

Somehow I managed to get through high school and college without ever having read The Aeneid.  I’m happy to have finally corrected that.

Inspired by Homer’s slightly better-known, more familiar works, Virgil’s The Aeneid takes the hero, Aeneas, a survivor of the fall of Troy, and tells his story of war and defeat, his loves and passion, and presents the best of human nobility and the pain of human suffering.

The book is much more episodic than I was expecting (I guess I wasn’t expecting anything, specifically). Our hero wanders and has some encounters. This takes up the early portions of the book.  Then his wanderings get him to places where he isn’t wanted and this the second portion of the book.

He may have lost the war, but the gods haven’t abandoned him … or have they?  These ancient Greek gods don’t always seem to have their s*** together and they’re just as likely to use a mortal to mess with another god as they are to help the suffering man. But the gods tell Aeneas that there’s a land for him just around the corner. What they don’t tell him is that he’s going to have to fight for it.

This translation by David West is quite read-able.  It’s still full of flowery prose, which sometimes elicits eyerolls from me, but I really appreciated this very accessible edition.

This is a ‘classic’ and as such, anyone interested in literature probably should read it, and for that, I’d heartily recommend this edition. But if I were given a choice, I would prefer to read Homer.

Looking for a good book? Virgil’s The Aeneid, translated and introduced by David West, is the classic, made accessible for modern readers. We see that heroes are human and fallible and the gods are untrustworthy.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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The Aeneid

author: Virgil

translator: David West

publisher: Penguin

ISBN: 0141996331

hardcover, 368 pages