by Miguel de Cervantes, 311 pages
Strong characters, interesting setup, good prose that comes across even in translation, yet for some reason this collection of short stories didn’t work for me. It ended up being quite a dull collection to read through, something about the situations and the atual stories for most of these semmed far too thin and much too drawn out. In no small part this is probably linked to the distances in space and time from the point of publication, but compared with Don Quixote’s energy and rich description, here the stories feel hollow, artificial, dessicated.
Typically I can see quite well why I didn’t like a particular work or author, find the issues that made it not click for him. Not in this case, there’s just a fundamental factor of grace and fun in the stories that make the pieces basically unengaging to me.
Worse than: Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Also worse than: The Crocodile by Fyodor Dostoevsky
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