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Don Quixote

Overview

Alonso Quijano, a minor gentleman of La Mancha, reads so many romances of chivalry that he comes to believe them, renames himself Don Quixote, takes a farm labourer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, and rides out to right wrongs that are not there. Inns are castles, windmills are giants, a peasant girl is the lady Dulcinea, and every defeat is explained by enchantment. In the second part, published ten years later, the characters have read the first part and are famous, and the people they meet stage adventures to amuse themselves at the knight's expense. It is usually called the first modern novel, and it is very long and very funny.

Notes

The oldest book on this list and the best portrait of a mind that has arranged its perceptions around a belief. Quixote is not stupid; he is intelligent, learned and consistent, and every piece of evidence against his world is absorbed into it as the work of enchanters. That is confirmation bias and the unfalsifiable hypothesis in a single character, written four centuries before either had a name. What keeps it from being cruel is Sancho, who does not believe a word of it and follows him anyway, and the second part, where the people who know better and play along come out of it worse than the madman. I think about that a good deal.

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