Tagged: Manchegan Madness
Why read Don Quixote? It remains the best as well as the first of all the novels…There are parts of yourself you will not know fully until you know, as well as you can, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. – Harold Bloom This is it, the grand novel of them all, the novel above all other novels: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Many of my friends think that my favorite novel is either Lord of the Rings or Les Misérables, and while I love Tolkien’s trilogy and Hugo’s magnum...
About a month ago I wrote about Manchegan Madness, and it now appears that certain members of the blogging community may be experiencing early symptoms. Sylvia at Classical Bookworm reports that she has joined Tilting at Windmills, a group of readers who will be spending May and June reading about the exploits of the famed Don Quixote of La Mancha. I’ve seen this before. It starts as a reading group but ends as a support group. Pretty soon they’ll be naming their pets Rocinante or Sancho Panza. Be careful! Manchegan Madness takes...
One of the biggest risks facing readers today is the danger of falling prey to Manchegan Madness. Manchegan Madness is an obsessive compulsive desire to act out the events of a fictional story and/or become a fictional character. The first known manifestation of Manchegan Madness was documented by Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote. If you are a habitual reader, you should learn to recognize these early signs of the onset of the disease: Naming your pets after literary characters: Our dog’s name is Pippin, and we constantly...
