Adventure

Not much to say about this one. I picked it because I wanted to read something lighter. Published in 1988 by a Brazilian author this is a short story about a shepherd boy in Spain that has a dream that recurs to him about a treasure near the pyramids. This launches the boy into a quest to find it where he encounters many interesting characters and learns “life lessons”. The two main points of this book are that each person has their own “personal legend” (or dharma) and that the secret to happiness is in pursuit of your personal legend. The second point is “when you really want something to happen, the whole universe will conspire so that your wish comes true”. Overall, it was pretty good, I wanted something lighter and maybe overshot. This would probably be very interesting reading for a small little, tiny man child.

Don Quixote is hailed by many as the best work of fiction ever written. While I’m not sure I’d go that far, it is impressive that a book written in the 1600s can still be funny, entertaining, and not terribly dated 400 years later. This book was a lot of fun to read. Don Quixote of La Mancha and his trusty squire, Sancho Panza, get into all sorts of hijinks as they travel around the Spanish countryside. Don Quixote is convinced he is a knight errant, and that all the stories about knight errantry that were told previously actually happened. This leads him into some very interesting and ironic situations. One of the most interesting things about this book is that, while everyone he comes into contact with almost immediately recognizes that he is insane, there is still some magnetic quality about the nobility of his character that causes people to like him. Additionally, even though he was insane, to some extent his madness created the reality that he believed in and gave him meaningful experiences that he would have missed out on if he hadn’t believed in knight errantry. This was a long book, maybe a touch too long, but was never dry.