Don Quixote is long, but it is not hard to understand: the difficulty is one of size and rhythm, not of plot. It is worth reading because the book works in layers, which can be read for the laughter, for the question of what is real, or for the way the author discusses his own book.
Size is the first obstacle: about 1,200 pages in an ordinary edition, in two parts, with 126 numbered chapters and a prologue in each part. The chapters are uneven, from two or three pages to more than twenty, and nearly all of them tell a single scene: an inn, a road, a castle. Whoever reads one chapter a day moves along well, and the reading schedule divides the book into 16 weeks, at about 11 pages a day.
What tires most are the novellas embedded in Part One, above all The Curious Impertinent, in chapters XXXIII to XXXV, and the story of the captive, in chapters XXXIX to XLI, which keep the gentleman away for several chapters. Part Two is more continuous, because the author says in chapter XLIV that he preferred episodes born of the same events to loose novellas. The titles Cervantes gave the chapters are long and sometimes misleading, so it is best not to rely on them to know what happens.
Carpeaux writes that the book will always have two kinds of readers: children, who do not yet know life, and adults, sorely tested by it. Whoever reads for the laughter finds a comedy of blows and mix-ups; whoever rereads finds the question of who decides what a scene is, and an ending that is resolved neither in laughter nor in tragedy.