First, get refined ideas of "classic" out of your mind when you approach Don Quixote. For, like virtually all the greatest works of prose literature, this is a lively, earthy story of real people. Sure, the central character is a bit of a kook whose very name has become synonymous with fighting imagined evils (literally tilting at windmills) and has given rise to an adjective — quixotic — having to do with the pursuit of impractical ideals. And sure he thinks his broken-down nag is a noble steed, the slovenly peasant Sancho Panza is his squire, and a whore is a virtuous lady to be saved. But we the readers are shown the world realistically, and the people in it as they really are — including the deluded main character.

In the Prologue to the first part of Don Quixote, Cervantes says he aims to destroy through ridicule the influence on people of his time of the romances of chivalry. The elderly Don Quixote has supposedly gone mad from reading too many such tales and sets about to emulate the adventures of chivalric knights, with ridiculous and pathetic results. The comic chapters showing his misadventures are indeed quite entertaining, and these are the bits that have entered popular culture, windmills and all.

But those bits are strung out over way too many pages of subplots and digressions into other tales that don't hold the interest, at least not the interest of a modern reader who does not recognize half the targets of satire. Too much poetry recited by lovesick shepherds and goatherds. It's a very long, hard slog to get through Part One.

Part Two, written by Cervantes ten years later, picks up the pace somewhat and actually makes the central character and his loyal servant much more interesting. Don Quixote and Sancho become less figures of whom to make fun than fully fleshed and endearing human beings. The story becomes more than Cervantes originally intended. 

This is a book that cries out for someone to produce an abridged version for the modern reader. It has so much to offer, but a thousand-plus pages of four-hundred-year-old satire is more than most of us are willing to accept.

— Eric