Reading groupBooks This article is more than 7 years oldDon Quixote or Jane Eyre – this month's reading group choice is yours
This article is more than 7 years oldTwo great world classics published 200 years apart have anniversaries in April, so we’re opening the celebrations with a choice: should we read Cervantes or Charlotte Brontë?
April 2016 marks 400 years since the death of Miguel de Cervantes. It also marks the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth. You don’t need me to tell you about the importance of either writer.
Don Quixote is arguably the first modern novel. (Some even say it’s a crucial modernist text.) It’s also a book that is still read, still enjoyed and still able to baffle and bemuse. It has influenced everyone from Shakespeare to Terry Gilliam via Henry Fielding and John Kennedy Toole. The world would be less colourful without it.
Jane Eyre, meanwhile, remains a central part of the English canon, an astonishing, vivid, angry and visionary masterpiece. A book that changed the way the English-speaking world thinks about fiction; not least because it demonstrated how well women can write it. Again, we’d all be diminished if we didn’t have it.
These two books are so significant, in fact, that I can’t decide between them. I thought the best way to settle the question of which one to look at this month on the Reading group would be to throw it open to a vote. I’m aware that this is possibly a blunt instrument when it comes to deciding between two of the greatest novels of all time … but heck, voting is fun – and provides a good chance to express an opinion on both novels.
On that latter note, I do have a personal preference. The truth is that, gnarled and angry and strange as it may be, I love Jane Eyre. Don Quixote, meanwhile, I can’t finish. In fact (embarrassingly enough), one of my earliest blogs here on the Guardian was about my serial inability to come to terms with Cervantes’ violent classic. Yet part of me wonders if this failure – and the fact that the book is so hard for modern readers – is an even better reason to tackle it here. Together, we might be able to conquer it. Or at least to get through a few hundred pages and start to understand why it has endured so long …
But that’s up to you. All you have to do to express a preference is post in the comments below. I’ll tot up the totals in a few days and then let’s get reading.
- This article was amended on 24 March 2016 to remove the suggestion that Don Quixote was published in 1616 and Jane Eyre in 1816. Don Quixote was published in two volumes, with the first part appearing in 1605 and the second in 1615. Jane Eyre was first published in 1847.
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