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Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes · novel, 1605·32 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version32 hrs → 50 sec
  • His madness has a precise, documented cause: too many books. His brains got so dry from reading that he lost his wits, particularly over the tangled prose of Feliciano de Silva. He spends four days naming his broken-down horse Rocinante, eight more naming himself Don Quixote, then invents a lady he was barely acquainted with, a farm girl named Aldonza Lorenzo, and renames her Dulcinea del Toboso.
  • He charges thirty or forty windmills, certain they are giants. Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, he tells Sancho before spurring Rocinante at the sails. A gust of wind shatters his lance and throws horse and rider rolling across the plain.
  • He frees a chain of convicts, and they stone him for it. He stops galley slaves being marched off to serve the king and demands to hear each man's crime individually before freeing them by force. The men he just liberated turn on him and Sancho, pelting them with stones and stripping Sancho's coat off his back.
  • Sancho actually gets his promised island, for exactly ten days. A duke and duchess stage the whole thing as a prank, installing Sancho as governor of Barataria and expecting him to embarrass himself. Instead he rules with blunt fairness, to everyone's surprise.
  • He quits the governorship with one of the book's best lines. Naked I was born, naked I find myself, I neither lose nor gain, Sancho says, bruised from a staged night attack, before kissing his donkey Dapple on the forehead and asking to go back to ploughing.
  • On his deathbed he renounces his own invented name. He asks to be called Alonso Quixano the Good again, and has a notary certify he died naturally and in his right mind. The stated reason: to stop any other author from falsely reviving him in a counterfeit sequel.
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it built the modern novel out of one running joke, a man's private delusions colliding with a world that will not accommodate them, and the joke coined its own idiom, "tilting at windmills," that outlived every knight-errant story it was mocking.

A minor nobleman reads himself insane on chivalry romances, then rides out as a knight-errant to fight giants that turn out to be windmills.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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