Two years, near enough. I got there.

I started this in the spring of one year and finished it in the winter of the next. That is not a boast. Four pages a night gets you through most things eventually, and this was the biggest thing I have taken on since I started reading that way.

A few honest notes.

The first part is much funnier than I expected. The windmills come early and everybody knows the windmills, but the sheep, and the helmet that is really a barber's basin, and the whole business at the inn where he keeps insisting it is a castle — those got proper laughs out of me at eleven at night with the lamp on. Sancho is the reason to read it. He is greedy and frightened and loyal and full of proverbs that don't quite fit the situation, and I would follow him anywhere.

The second part is a stranger thing altogether. Everyone in it has read the first part. People know who he is before he arrives. The duke and duchess set up elaborate cruel jokes for him, and it stops being funny quite deliberately, and I found that long stretch rather sad going. I don't think that is a criticism. I think that is what the man was after.

Where it lost marks with me is the repetition. There are passages where a stranger turns up at an inn and tells his life story for four or five nights running, and I would come to the end of my reading with no clear idea who was talking or why, and have to go back over it on a Sunday morning. There is also a whole other novel dropped into the middle about somebody else entirely, and I confess I went at that one with my eyes half shut.

Practical matters, since nobody ever writes them down. I read the Grossman translation, which goes along easily and has a great many footnotes I mostly ignored. It is a heavy book and will not stay open by itself, which matters more than you would think when you are propped up in bed. I ended up buying a paperback as well for travelling and reading the two alternately, which meant two bookmarks and a certain amount of confusion around Easter.

I lost the thread badly in December. Both Decembers, as it happens. Something about that month.

The ending got me. He comes home, he gets his wits back, and having his wits back turns out to be the worst thing that could happen to him, and Sancho standing there begging him to get up and take to the road again is one of the few things I have read in ten years that I wanted to talk to somebody about the next morning. I did try. My son was not interested.

Seven, because of the middle. But I am glad I did it, and I would say to anybody who fancies it and thinks they haven't the time: a few pages is plenty. It has waited four hundred years. It will wait for you.