Based on that track record, I figured I would love "Don Quixote", but now I find myself writing a Reddit post asking what I'm missing about it instead of actually reading it. The other books that came with the librarian's recommendation were "Frankenstein" (which I loved, especially the way the monster was actually depicted as intelligent and not just the pop culture version of a moaning green guy with bolts on his neck), "Middlemarch" (which took me a while to get through but is quite possibly the best written book I have ever read), "Infinite Jest" (which I found enjoyable but quite confusing, and which I plan to reread in the near future), and "Fahrenheit 451" (which I thought was incredible). Lovecraft, and when I was younger a crap ton of Star Wars and science fiction books), and I've only recently started reading more widely regarded books. Possibly relevant here is the fact that I haven't read a whole lot of "classics" so far - most of my reading has been genre fiction (e.g. I just read the part where he killed seven sheep because he thought he was participating in a war between two great armies - is there supposed to be something funny about that, or about any of the other scenes where people get injured or worse because of Don's actions? So far, the overwhelming impression I get is that Don is very mentally ill and has no grasp at all on reality, and he has been causing a lot of harm wherever he has gone, and I find very little of it funny. I recently started reading Don Quixote for the first time on a recommendation from my local library, who said that it was "widely considered one of the funniest and also most tragic books ever written." So I found a copy of it from Project Gutenberg - if it matters, it is the John Ormsby translation - and I'm currently on chapter XVII and wondering if I'm perhaps missing something about this book, because I really, really do not see the humour in it.
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