The Novel Cure: Literary prescriptions for lethargy

Ailment: Lethargy

Cure: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Once lethargy has set in, leaving you heavy in limb and languorous in spirit, it is cussedly hard to shift. One needs an injection of energy – and where is that initial injection likely to come from? The answer, of course, is to beg, borrow or steal it from someone else. For this purpose, no one should be without a copy of Don Quixote by Cervantes. Just a page or two is tonic enough; and it doesn't necessarily have to be read in order. Cut a volume up into handy chunks and keep them in strategic places in your house, car, handbag and place of work, taking a quick draught whenever a pick-me-up is required.

The lovable, excitable Don Quixote is a man after our own hearts. Not only is he addicted to chivalric romance novels, selling off his land to pay for them and staying up all night to read them. But the subsequent loss of sleep affects his wits and he starts to believe he's a knight-errant from out of their pages himself. Each day he rises early, dons his great-grandfather's spruced-up coat of armour, and sallies forth on horseback in search of his own adventures – ever hopeful of finding a damsel in distress to rescue and love, or a rascal to run through with a lance. Tireless, undaunted by setbacks, he elevates the world around him with his romance-tinged vision, so that plain roadside inns become castles with silver pinnacles, peasants become princesses, and windmills become an army of giants. Yes, he's a little crazy; but if that's what it takes to procure an irrepressibly jaunty, blithesome spirit, who's complaining?

If Quixote's whimsical approach to life doesn't sit naturally with your 21st-century realism, we defy you to remain unaffected by Cervantes's beguilingly snappy 17th-century prose. Take it neat, spilling from his pen as it does with its breathless upswing and cavalier call to arms. It's one of literature's best stimulants.

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