In the category of Pre 20th-Century, Team Discovery Channel is proud to select:
Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes.
Surprisingly easy to read and utterly hilarious,
Don Quixote is in many ways the foundation on which all modern literature rests occupies a unique space between the medieval romance and the modern novel and was selected by the Nobel Institute as The Greatest Book of All Time.
Published in two volumes a decade apart ,
Don Quixote is the most influential work of literature to emerge from the
Spanish Golden Age and perhaps the entire
Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of
modern Western literature, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published.
[1]
Alonso Quixano, a retired country gentleman in his fifties, lives in an unnamed section of
La Mancha with his niece and a housekeeper. He has become obsessed with books of chivalry, and believes their every word to be true, despite the fact that many of the events in them are clearly impossible. Quixano eventually appears to other people to have lost his mind from little sleep and food and because of so much reading.
He decides to go out as a
knight-errant in search of adventure. He dons an old suit of armor, renames himself "Don Quixote de la Mancha," and names his skinny horse "
Rocinante." He designates a neighboring farm girl, Aldonza Lorenzo, as his ladylove, renaming her Dulcinea del Toboso, while she knows nothing about this. Eventually, he "acquires" his iconic "helmet"