How Don Quixote got away from Cervantes - he started out writing a satire, but ...

Let me be really cranky and immature and say that I started (re)reading Miguel Cervantes's "Don Quixote" last night and the first thing I need to point out is that this new edition (Grossman translation - excellent) from Ecco is just too damn heavy (literally). It's a 945-page hardback; many years ago I read the old Modern Library edition, perfectly fine, loved the novel - I think it was the book I was reading when I entered college - or maybe had just finished it? - haven't come back to it since, not sure what re-reading will add or could add - we all know, from the popular culture and the Broadway adaptation the lineaments of Quixote's character, and I remember of course from first reading that Cervantes goes through a great deal of commotion at the top of the novel building this up as a parody of chivalry - he tells us right from the first pages that DQ had literally gone mad from reading too many tales of knights errant, and he decks his book out like many popular trash novels of his day, with many epigrams and poems of praise - all this humor was lost on me when I was 17 and to be honest it's not all that funny today: what is obvious is that this book got away from Cervantes and become much bigger and grander than he'd anticipated - he thought he was writing, or he started out to write, a simple parody or satire and ended up writing one of the great works of world lit. But can I keep reading this edition? It will kill my hands - why couldn't they have published it in 2 volumes?