2025 Readings 113

 If I blew through Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower in two days, my 113th book dragged itself across the finish line in dribs and drabs after months on my nightstand. This is not a condemnation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Don Quixote, but rather the recognition that it was not a book designed for a passionate reading marathon. The title of the book describes itself: it is the actual lecture notes that Nabokov prepared for a class he taught on Cervantes's classic. However, Nabokov clearly didn't consider Don Quixote to be a classic, and was dragooned into teaching it. He considered it to be a cruel book, and I think that's an interesting (and in many ways correct) interpretation. Nabokov proposed that Cervantes's talent as a writer and the beauty of Don Quixote as a character made up for a poorly structured novel that mainly seemed designed to cruelly misuse the poor knight errant. I only read Don Quixote in its entirety a couple years ago and really liked it, flying into a minor rage when some wanker on a podcast that Janet likes was telling his listeners that they didn't need to bother reading the novel. I'm not going to agree with the wanker in question or Nabokov, because I definitely think you should read Don Quixote. Still, it was interesting to get Nabokov's very different interpretation, and it inspired me to give Cervantes another read sooner than later.