Hello blog readers, or maybe just reader? Anyway the book that I have been reading and will be chronicling in this blog is Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. The book is about a man named Quixana who was an honest gentleman who in his free time liked to read books about knight-errantry. The book after some minor explanation informs the reader that due to too much reading of his books Quixana loses his wits and goes completely mad as in insane, and that is where the book actually starts to become interesting and get to the meat of the story. Quixana after he is taken by madness starts to fashion himself into a knight-errant like from one of the stories he is so enamored with and crafts his identity of Don Quixote, the man of la Mancha. He then after creating his identity, renaming his horse, and creating a woman that he would be in love with like all other knight-errants, he sets off on his adventure to preform chivalrous acts.
I have read about 140 pages by the time I have written this post, and I have reached a point where I feel like I have to guess what is going to happen in the story. The point I am at has our wonderfully insane Don Quixote getting into a duel with a bizicayan carriage escort over some “captive princesses” that were being kidnapped by two “wizards”.
I feel that Don Quixote will receive a major beating in this duel because the last time he tried to enter to get into a fight, his horse fell out from under him and he was left helpless and was beaten, this is one reason I feel that he will receive a beating and that is because I feel that Cervantes was going to create this reoccurring theme of Don Quixote being beaten after trying to be knightly. I also think that he will be hurt because, all that we know of Quixana before he became Don Quixote shows that he did not seem to be a fighter before and does not seem do be one at the time of his duel, I just can not, given the madness and his past failures in combat , believe that Don Quixote would even have a remote chance of winning this conflict that he has put himself into.
Hey hey Brenden! Sounds like you really like this book. It sounds like you're engaged by it. It actually makes me want to read it and find out more. So I'm guessing maybe the characters from this book are French, correct me if I'm wrong but I'm just guessing by the character's names you wrote about on your blog. You know when I was reading this and you mentioned the man of La Mancha, it remind me of a song that I sang for choir and it was based on the musical Man of La Mancha, I think. I'm not really sure, but I thought that was pretty interesting. My question is what made caught your eye during your reading or what caught your mind per say? How did you stay engaged in the story? Did you start analyzing the story as soon as you began to read or did you try to enjoy the book first then analyze it? If you started analyzing first what did you look for in the story to grasp the meaning?
ReplyDeleteThis book sounds so elegant with princesses and knights and wizards, I like how it sounds. Oh wow! There's duels as well. It sounds pretty interesting to me. It seems like you have a pretty strong opinion on what's going on in the story as well as what's going to happen. Do you like take notes on it and look back to see if you're opinion is right? I'm sure that would be pretty helpful.
Well, Brenden, it seems like Don Quixote for you is pretty awesome, I would like to read this during my leisure time and find out more from the story myself. Overall you're pretty engaged. :)