January 31: What "Don Quixote" Really Slew (Vol. 14, pp. 60-67)

How totally nuts was the Man of La Mancha? This introduction to Cervantes' eccentric and not quite all there amateur knight has our hero convinced that windmills are giant beasts to be slain.

This book, written in 1805, is generally considered to be the first modern novel and a satire of the tales of chivalry so popular in the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, it fits the rubric of a classic — a book everyone praises and few read.

January 30: First Problem Play Popular (Vol. 8, pp. 255-266)

Sophicles' "Antigone," is today's selection, in honor of the day in 405 B.C. that he died in Athens. More impenetrable Greek drama.

January 29: Visits the Land of Fire (Vol. 29, pp. 209-221)

Charles Darwin visits Tierra Del Fuego in this passage from "The Voyage of the Beagle." Unfortunately, this is an "aren't the natives weird" story, emblematic of the era of exploration where the mighty white man was out to civilize the savages. Not a good introduction to Darwin.

January 28: Man's Wings (Vol. 7, pp. 242-249)

If Dante wasn't bad enough, here comes a selection from Thomas à Kempis' "The Imitation of Christ," and his statement that "a pure heart seeth the very depths of heaven and hell." This assumes one believes in the existence of these places as well as the rest of the mumbo-jumbo of organized religion. Atheists, agnostics and freethinkers are not welcome in the world of the Harvard Classics.

January 27: Dante and Beatrice in Paradise (Vol. 20, pp. 267-279)

Dante, like Milton, gets a bad reputation for being unreadable, and Dante's "Divine Comedy," which is today's selection, is deserving of this status. In this snippet, our hero is schlepping through purgatory when he runs into Beatrice, a lost and unrequited love. Dante then gets into the same hallucinatory nonsense that the "Divine Comedy" is famous for.

Not exactly easy nor interesting reading, although it's interesting that the reading guide chose a less gory and graphically violent selection to introduce the reader to Dante.

January 26: In the Cradle of Civilization (Vol. 33, pp. 55-65)

January 26: In the Cradle of Civilization (Vol. 33, pp. 55-65)

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus, called "the father of all storytellers," tells a tale of palace intrigues in the Egypt of the Pharaohs. There are some bizarre stories in his "An Account of Egypt," but he at least makes the effort to separate which stories have some elements of truth and which are just tall tales. In this way, you could argue that he helped to set the parameters of historical writing.

January 25: A Field Mouse Made Famous (Vol. 6, pp. 119-120, 388-394)

Robert Burns, the Scottish poet, was born this day in 1759. The title refers to one of today's poems, "To a Mouse," and the story of how a Scottish farmer plowing his field accidently plows up the nest of a frightened mouse.

The Scot dialect in which Burns writes his poems is highly annoying, but the sentiment of the poem stands up — that misfortune can pop up at any time without warning and that "the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley."

That's the line everyone remembers from the poem, but this sentiment is the real takeaway — "Backward cast my eye/on prospects drear!/an' forward, tho' I canna see,/I guess an' fear." In other words, we're all flying blind, wondering when the plowman will turn our lives over.