Jesse’s Reviews > Don Quixote > Status Update
Jesse
is on page 350 of 940
Don Quixote has a lot of the title character goofing off but his bumbling path draws sympathetic characters together and part of at least the first half of this story is that he indirectly accomplishes some good, with a huge romance concluding between Don Fernando, Cardenio, Luscinda, and Dorotea. Now we are in a historical romance involving Christian captives and moors that is partly based on Cervantes’s own life.
— Jun 30, 2025 09:34AM
Like flag
Jesse’s Previous Updates
Jesse
is on page 900 of 940
The bachelor arriving and besting Don Quixote as he had intended to at the beginning of the second book is obvious but it happens so abruptly that it shocks the entire novel. There’s a shadow of the interwoven side stories here as the moor escape narrative reappears but with some twists in the telling.
— Jul 10, 2025 09:02AM
Jesse
is on page 850 of 940
The whole episode of the Duke and Duchess ends a lot better than I was assuming, especially given how poorly some of the practical jokes were on two basically good hearted character. The novel has now sort of settled back into its groove of the wandering knight and his squire meeting mishaps as well as people who have read the book that tells his personal history (and bagging on the unauthorized first sequel)
— Jul 10, 2025 08:00AM
Jesse
is on page 800 of 940
As fun as the Duke and the duchess indulging in the Quixotic antics is, there’s a certain mean-spiritedness about the whole thing, but it’s a complex tapestry as Don Quixote and Sancho are simultaneously being made fun of while at the same time the people making sport of them are basically roleplaying along with knight errantry and the governorship as a chance to have some adventure in their lives.
— Jul 10, 2025 06:54AM
Jesse
is on page 750 of 940
There is a hilarious farce where the two are blindfolded on a wooden horse and get a sensory experience to fool them into thinking they are flying through outer space, and it turns out the horse is loaded with fireworks???, and people be constantly testing Don Quixote and Sancho’s reasoning, amazed at both their wisdom and their foolishness.
— Jul 09, 2025 07:51PM
Jesse
is on page 700 of 940
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza stumble upon a wealthy noble couple who indulge in the pair’s insanity for their own amusement—they’ve read and loved the book—and are in the process of manufacturing knight errant adventures. So far they have given Sancho a ridiculous task to free Dulcinea from enchantment and are now gearing up for some new bizarre side story.
— Jul 09, 2025 10:12AM
Jesse
is on page 650 of 940
Some wild and weird stuff in this stretch of prose. Don Quixote lowers himself into a cave and has a hallucinatory fantasy regarding a well-known Spanish legend; Don Quixote destroys a puppet show run by a convict who he freed in the first volume; there’s an absurd story regarding a village known for being able to bray with the best of them; and Don Quixote steals a boat and almost gets chewed up by watermills,
— Jul 08, 2025 10:05AM
Jesse
is on page 600 of 940
there is a tone change with the beginning of this book insofar as there is less bawdy comedy with regard to Don Quixote’s misadventures, and he is on a track of being in the right place and at the right time where circumstance backs up his efforts at knight errantry and while most people realize his madness for being a knight they see that he is otherwise crammed full of sage wisdom and intelligent advice.
— Jul 02, 2025 02:54PM
Jesse
is on page 550 of 940
I kind of spoiled myself on the plot twist of the Knight of the Mirrors, but since Cervantes isn’t keeping it up for the whole book, I’m less disappointed. The satire and adventure of this half of the novel has been a bit more focused thus far, at least the last fifty pages or so (the first 50 had that critique of the first half of the book). Sancho seems to be a wiser character this time around.
— Jul 02, 2025 08:24AM
Jesse
is on page 500 of 940
The first fifty pages of the second book contain a bit where Don Quixote finds out that he is a character in the previous book, and that the book exists, and that people in their world have read it, and includes a lot of positive and negative criticisms of the novel at the time, going so far as to address plot holes that were pointed out over the intervening 15 years between the two publications. It’s awesome.
— Jul 01, 2025 10:02AM
Jesse
is on page 450 of 940
idk what I was expecting but this has been a very different book than I was imagining. You have very “real” romantic dramas going on around Don Quixote, with Shakespearean twists and revelations, and then the title character and his squire are bumbling around like comedic relief, though their random walk has provided the solution to some of these dramas, just not by any intelligible motivation.
— Jul 01, 2025 07:36AM
