Gulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift
Overview
From the Publisher
Considered the greatest satire ever written in English, Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels chronicles the fantastic voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, principally to four marvelous realms: Lilliput, where the people are six inches tall; Brobdingnag, a land inhabited by giants; Laputa, a wondrous flying island; and a country where the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses, are served by savage humanoid creatures called Yahoos.
Beneath the surface of this enchanting fantasy lurks a devastating critique of human malevolence, stupidity, greed, vanity, and short-sightedness. A brilliant combination of adventure, humor, and philosophy, Gulliver’s Travels is one of literature’s most durable masterpieces.
My thoughts
If I am to read Gulliver's Travels, then I'm glad that I'm reading it through the Barnes & Noble Classics series. This book is heavy on political satire that I'm not necessarily familiar with, so the footnotes that explain the correlations are not only appreciated but essential in understanding the book. I give a big hat's off to B&N for the effort they put into their classics to make them readable today.
Having said that, I gave up on the book before I finished it. I made it to page 120 and then decided the book was simply too much work. I may pick it up again later and finish it but there's a lot more fun in my library that I'm going to pick up first.
Favorite Passage
Towards night I got with some difficulty into my house, where I lay on the ground, and continued to do so about a fortnight; during which time the Emperor gave orders to have a bed prepared for me. Six hundred beds of the common measure were brought in carriages, and worked up in my house; an hundred and fifty of their beds sewn together made up the breadth and length, and these were four double, which however kept me but very indifferently from the hardness of the floor, that was of smooth stone.
