with little sleeping and much reading

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
- Samuel Johnson

These next few months are going to entail a lot of reading. For starters, I have that class on Cervantes and Don Quixote. Just about 100 pages into the book, I can see what all the fuss is about.

For those who don't know the story - and I'm sure you are few - Don Quixote is the story of a man, Alonso Quixano, who becomes "mad" and loses his grasp on reality from reading so many books on chivalry and romance. He decides that he must become a knight-errant and travel the land doing good, saving people from injustices, and offering it all up for the love and honor of his Dulcinea of El Toboso.

One of the world's greatests works of fiction, if not the greatest, Don Quixote was something completely new - it marked the crossover from the chivalric romance and the modern novel as we know it today. In it, Cervantes undermined the conventions and traditions of the chivalric and pastoral prose that had been popular up until his time. While the literary custom at the time was often to imitate the writers and figures who had come before, he instead took something that he believed had become very stale and out of it created characters richer and more alive than the literary world had ever seen. Cervantes was greatly influenced by many other writers, but for what he did with Don Quixote, there was no comparison.

To say he was a well-read man would be an understatement - Cervantes read everything and lived a life that reads, appropriately enough, very much like a book of adventure and woe and intrigue and love.

And so here I am, reading Don Quixote, reminding myself that, like Cervantes, I really have to start reading more of, well, everything. They say the problem with most poets is that they don't read much poetry, and the problem with a lot of writers is that they don't read much of other people's work.

Cervantes would have thought this preposterous.

Read, read, read. And then, when you're done, read again.

At some point, when you're not reading, you'll find you've written something, better and more informed than you ever could have imagined.