In the Library
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes, 1605
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 29 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by John Ormsby
- Original
- Original es
- Chapters
- Chapters 126
- Length
- Length 400k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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Laurence Sterne
Sterne takes the novel Cervantes invented and dismantles it before it can begin.
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Gustave Flaubert
Another reader destroyed by the distance between books and life, but Flaubert leaves no room for laughter.
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The Pickwick Papers
Charles Dickens
Dickens sends a genial, deluded gentleman and his loyal companion out on the road for the same episodic string of comic misadventures, but softens the satire into affection.
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About the book
On a plain in La Mancha, a thin old man levels his lance at a row of windmills, certain they are giants with flailing arms, and charges. He is wrong, of course. He is wrong about almost everything: the roadside inn is a castle, the farm girl Dulcinea a princess, a barber's brass basin the golden helmet of a hero. He has read so many tales of knighthood that his mind has cracked open, and out of the crack pours something the saner world has lost. Beside him trots Sancho Panza, fat and proverb-stuffed and helplessly devoted, and theirs may be the tenderest friendship in all of literature. The miracle is that you start by laughing at the madman and end unable to laugh, because his delusion is only the wish that the world were braver and kinder than it is. No book is funnier, and few are this kind. Cervantes will not tell you whether to mock the knight or kneel to him, and by the end you cannot do either alone.