In a broader sense it is the forerunner off other situations where individuals, communities or systems live a complete lie.This is truely an amazing book, one that you won't want to put down once you have started.DON QUIXOTE is a must read which you should include with other must reads like WAR AND PEACE, UNION MOUJIK, GULLIVER'S TRAVEL,CANTERBURY TALES. One thing for sure is that this new translation of DON QUIXOTE will make it a popular story even with the young.

Don Quixote recruits a local peasant to act as his squire (Sancho Panza) and they go off on a series of adventures. In one of these very first and most famous adventures Don Quixote charges a series of windmills believing them to be giants, and most of the rest of the series of adventures is similar to this. After awhile other people find out about Don Quixote's efforts and the interactions with them are quite funny at times.

In fact one of the other aspects of this novel that I absolutely love is the humor with which it is told. The stories are absolutely hysterical at times, all with that kind of tongue in cheek humor. As you read them you will think that many of them are cliche but it was in fact Cervantes who is at the root of many of these cliches, in other words Don Quixote is the inspiration of the very cliches.

I wholeheartedly recommend this novel to everyone. It is quite long and will take you awhile to read, but I recommend breaking it up into a couple of chapters and reading them every few nights. This will of course take even longer but I really feel that's the best way to read it. In fact if it weren't for some of the more ribald situations, Don Quixote would make a great novel to read to kids, reading a chapter or two every night, maybe a parent with creative editing capabilities could pull off such an effect. Overall, you should read this book, it brings a whole new perspective to modern novels. But try it for yourself! Another book I need to recommend -- completely unrelated to Cervantes, but very much on my mind since I purchased a "used" copy off Amazon is "The Losers' Club: Complete Restored Edition" by Richard Perez, an exceptional, highly entertaining little novel I can't stop thinking about.

DON QUIXOTE is such a marvelously complex and rich book that everyone's reading of the novel will be unique. My delight in the book stems from two main sources. First is Cervantes's miraculous gift as a storyteller. Although the novel is without any possible question one of the four or five most influential works of literature in history, every chapter seems eternally fresh and enchanting. Everyone knows at least something about the book, usually about Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and the incident of the windmills, and many imagine that from this they have some notion of what the novel is like. But these impressions rarely hint at Cervantes's genius as a spinner of tales, of his playfulness, of his acute sense of humor, his originality, and his inventiveness. Though we like to imagine that we "know" Don Quixote, Cervantes manages to surprise the reader on nearly every page. He is especially delightful in the second half of the novel, published several years after the first part, which allows Cervantes to depict Quixote and Sancho as famous celebrities because of the success of the first half. Whereas in the first half they labored in obscurity, in the second half they reign as celebrities. Cervantes also jousts with the real life author of an unauthorized second half to DON QUIXOTE.

Second, I find the novel delightful for the richness and brilliance of the two central characters. Don Quixote is a character about whom it is possible to say many true things, without thereby exhausting what it is possible to say. He is insane-and despite 20th and 21st century attempts to celebrate this as an attempt to condemn the insanity of society of a whole and assert an alternative form of rationality, we are not intended to admire his insanity. This is not CATCH-22. Rather, Cervantes sees Quixote's insanity as an affliction. In terms of early 17th century psychology, Quixote goes insane from a drying up of the brain induced by staying up too many nights reading books on chivalry (it was thought at the time that the brain gradually dried up while staying awake and remoisturized at night while asleep). Many of Quixote's moments of greatest folly occur after nights spent without sleep, and his sanity at the end of the book is restored after finally managing to sleep for several hours. Despite this (though not because of it), Quixote is a lovable and admirable character. We hurt for him, but we admire his genuine physical courage, his high moral principles, his devotion to his cause, and his powerful sense of justice. Equally delightful is Sancho Panza, who seems incapable of uttering anything without it being imbued with unintentional humor. Indeed, many of my favorite parts of the book are those where Sancho simply starts talking. The two, of course, enjoy a host of "adventures," but these are mainly just excuses to provide settings for Quixote and Sancho to shine. As readers we care less about their next adventures than for the opportunity and privilege of spending time in their company.

One commentator in the documentary on Terry Gilliam's failed attempt to film DON QUIXOTE correctly points out that the more we see Don Quixote suffer under his insanity, the more we come to care for and love him. This is a profound truth. No matter how delusional he becomes, we want things to end well for him, but worry that perhaps his madness has gone too far, and indeed if there is a tragic moment in the book it is when he returns home to his village defeated.

This is truly one of the great books every written, and of all the classics, one of the most readable and loveable.