Gulliver's Travels

Are we sure this was for children? ? It's either long-winded in philosophy and politics or going off on how the locals eat their excrement...I guess that last one would play with some kids. I think the picture book I had of this was better, just the exciting parts of being a giant or being tiny, and none of the grown-up pontificating.

I’ve been curious about this book for a long time—ever since I first heard about it, I think. Near the beginning of last year, I decided I ought to just start working through some of the old classics I’ve always wanted to read and never got to, and decided to start this one. This took me over a year to read by itself, so I’m not sure how well my goal of getting through other books is going to go…. Regardless, I’m glad I took the time to read this one.

Gulliver’s Travels is, to put it in a few words, wildly imaginative. All the way through, I was marveling at Jonathan Swift’s ability to come up with one more crazy scenario…which was then succeeded by another even crazier scenario, and then another one after that! The way he looks at the world, too, is quite interesting; in some ways, this book is a satirical analysis of the current English culture in which Swift found himself. I’d be fascinated to research what was going on in history at the time this book was written, because I feel like world events could have easily had a say in what happened in this story.

I’m glad I read this book. It’s interesting to read a piece of literature that has been influencing generations for close to 300 years now, and I’m sure some of the ideas put forth in this story have sparked many new creative ideas for other stories we come across today. Unusual, varying from light fantasy to some mild sci-fi, this collection of four stories was intriguing, ridiculous, and often a lot of fun to imagine as I read through them. I’m glad I read this book, even though it took me so long to get through it, was wordier than I anticipated, and was slightly depressing at the end. I doubt I’d ever read it again, but I’m glad I got through it once.

This initially had some good moments - it was interesting thinking about the differences in scale between Gulliver, the Lilliputians and the Brobdingnagians - but it grew more and more tedious and the misogyny more and more apparent. The points about human shortcomings and political corruption and so on were made, and then made again, and then made a third time. Glad it's over.

Tedious. I hate Neil deGrasse Tyson

Gulliver is an extremely unlucky sailor who keeps getting marooned on odd islands undiscovered by European society. Each native culture takes him in as a curiosity and proceeds to teach him their language and ways. He meets a nation of tiny people, a nation of giants, a nation of talking horses and several others. Ultimately, each nation will find him unfit company and either banish him or allow him to escape back to sea and be reunited with his own kind.

This is a silly book full of fantastical tales that each have critiques to make of current European culture.

Far more interesting than I'd hoped, given how old it is. I see both why it has historically been praised, and why I'm glad to say I've read it and now never pick it up again.

Got around to read this classic. Book is essentially a collection of author's imaginations on what people will do and act in different strange societies. Author imagines well on social culture and actions based on people but doesn't think through a lot on social and technological environment. All socieities - small people, monsterous people, floating people, horse people - have pretty much that distinction but rest of world - animals, plants, things and inventions - are similar to rest of normal world. Transition from one society to another, through multiple sea voyages, is fast and not dwelt much upon. Lots of people found this work of Swift to be satire on modern world, and it kind of is, but very peripheral one. For instance religion and politicians can be arbitary and foolish and that's mentioned as such without really understanding depth of things. In the end, excitement of new world goes away from readers and long monologues of narrator's experiences and discourse within those society becomes boring. It's readable but forgettable book.

Absolutely fun read. first time to read the book since college....40 years ago! Bought the book in Myanmar, but read it in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, finishing it on the Thai train up the Malay Peninsula to Bangkok. Had forgotten that Gulliver's islands seem to be in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. For a traveller, this is a necessary and a fun read....

I was extremely surprised by the story told in this book mainly because of the presupposition that I had because of a very old movie that I had seen. Yes, there were the little people and the giants but then the story goes on to further travels. The "adventures" show mankind in a very poor way with the satirical exposures of bad governments and prejudices that we would find nonsensical today. However, I wonder if 300 years from now if mankind would feel the same about our prejudices.

Maybe we can still learn from the past.

The last book of the four, about the utopian society of the horses I liked the best by far. In the first two the author is obsessed with the sizes of all things, these being extremely small (Lilliput) or extremely large (land of the giants). The third book is a bit chaotic with all the different countries visited by Gulliver. The last book is a real and complete satirical story with a melancholy undertone.

Jonathan Swift must have been smoking opium when he wrote this because it is wackadoodle. It is also weird to have a female read the book when the main character is a man. I don't think I would have read the physical book.

I must admit that this book wasn’t on my ‘radar’ and I don’t suppose I’d have read it if it wasn’t for reading T H White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose, which features the Lilliputians. This book has been popular from the time it was first published. I think that originally it was considered to be a children’s book but like Mistress Masham’s Repose, I can’t see it appealing to huge numbers of today’s children, but of course, I could be wrong.

I enjoyed the first two sections but for me the book went downhill after then. I wouldn’t say I hated the last two sections but I was rather glad to get to the end of the book! I was amused that there was quite a lot of ‘toilet humour’ in the book, considering when it was first published. Overall quite an enjoyable read but it didn’t really live up to expectations.

For those of you who be all, like, "What? You never read Gulliver's Travels?", the answer is yes, and that's exactly why I've embarked on reading the 1,001 Books I Need to Read Before I die. It will help me catch up on much of what was not mandatory on my poor educational track. Besides, I get to experience so much with fresh eyes, that I actually feel I prefer it, in a way. I found the book thoroughly interesting, and it appealed to my peripatetic nature and my natural curiosity for differences and similarities between cultures. As for what exactly Swift was satirizing, I have no idea. I don't know the politics of his time and region. The book was good enough without pondering all that.

Most people have at least heard of Gulliver’s Travels and it’s hard not to have a few preconceived notions pop into your head for a book like that. I knew the general idea before I read it, but I was surprised by the specific observations Gulliver shares about each race he visits. A shipwreck strands Gulliver with the Lilliputs and a series of adventures follow.

Originally published as a satire, the book is now read by all ages. He travels all over and meets the strangest people. He makes observations about their ways of life and in doing so often tells more about himself and his prejudices than he means to. Each new group teaches him something about the way he sees the world.

The Lilliputs are a tiny people, so small they can fit in his hand. They have to make 100 meals just to feed him. The very next group he discovers are giants and he is now the tiny figure that can fit in their hand. His observations of both of these groups were not always what you would expect. Sometimes he remarks on the texture of their skin. He even makes some hilarious comments about watching one of the giants nurse and being terrified by her enormous breast. The woman who takes care of him in the giants’ land sews him shirts lets him to use items from her dollhouse.

There’s a lot of humor worked into the stories. At one point he gets in a fight with the queen’s dwarf and is dropped into a giant bowl of cream and then stuck into a marrow bone. There are houseflies that constantly plague him because they're the size of birds. He can see when the flies lay eggs in the giants’ food because they look so large to him. Gulliver also discovers the Houyhnhnms, a race of horses that are superior to all the other races he describes.

The thing I loved about it was that it made you look at your own world a little differently. It makes you notice things that you normally take for granted. The whole book is a fascinating exercise in how our situation and surroundings affect the way we see the world. Swift manages to do this in a humorous way, never taking himself too seriously. It broke my heart a little that Gulliver kept leaving his family to travel and then when he finally returns he never quite gets over leaving the Houyhnhnms.

BOTTOM LINE: At times clever, at others dry, this classic gives the reader a lot to think about when they view their own society. It’s a reminder that so much of what we believe is based on what we already know. The more we learn about other cultures, the more we can understand them and appreciate their strengths.

Aargh. Really tedious. The tale of being in Lilliput was fairly humorous, but the rest were just tedious to the point of beating a dead horse (or a Honyhnhnm, as the case may be).

The Lilliput saga worked as a story, but none of the others did and I didn't think any of it worked as allegory either. Instead of learning from the civilizations he encountered, he became an unhappy shell of a person who couldn't even stand being in the same room with his wife and children. If there was no hope for the human race, why didn't he just off himself and put the reader out of his/her misery?!

Written in 1727, a critique of our industrial policy in 2014: In these colleges the professors contrive new... tools for all trades and manufactures; whereby, as they undertake, one man shall do the work of ten; a palace may be built in a week, of materials so durable as to last for ever without repairing. .... The only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection; and in the mean time, the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes. By all which, instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair.

In the second half of the 17th century, Robert Hooke and Antony von Leeuwenhoek refined and used the microscope to view, for the first time, the microbiotic world around them. In a generation, people's conception of large and small shifted. "It is no exaggeration," says Henri Hitchins, "to say that without the development of microscopy Swift's book would not have been written" (376).

Most of us know that Swift wrote a tale about a seafarer named Gulliver who washed up on a beach in Lilliput only to be pinned to the ground by little people. Some know that Gulliver's next voyage was to Brobdingnag where he encountered people as large from his perspective as he was to the Lilliputans. This is only half the book.

In the second half he traveled to the floating island of Laputa where he met people who are so enraptured by philosophy and abstractions that they hire a "flappers" to attend to them on walks. The sole purpose of the flapper is to "gently to strike with his bladder the mouth of him who is to speak, and the right ear of him or them to whom the speaker addresses himself" (192). You could say the Laputans are so heavenly minded they're no earthly good.

The final journey puts Gulliver in the land of the Houyhnhnms, a place where proto-humans have degenerated into disgusting "Yahoos" who are disdained by utterly rational (and virtually passionless) horses.

If the microscope inspired the shift in optical perspective in Gulliver's first two journeys, it is a metaphor used to peer into the core of human nature during the second two trips. On the last journey, Gulliver's conversation with the Houyhnhnms reveal the depth of humanity's depravity—bordering on horror. He describes the reality of life in England in a richly ironic way that exposes dark truths about his society. Take his description of lawyers, for example:

"I said there was a society of men among us bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose that white is black and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves" (304).

While it's easy to spot the sarcasm in Swift's voice, I can't help but think that a better understanding of the history of 18th century England would help me to catch more of the specific references. Still, Gulliver's Travels, despite having been written three centuries ago, was quite a page-turner. This is no mere children's book!

A local librarian told me this wasn't like reading a modern fictional novel. I know older books can be difficult, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be and was quite funny in parts!

I put of reading this book for so long, I had begun to believe I had actually read it! It is quite biting in it's satire and very funny, but there are parts where it gets tedious.

Pretty good stuff. Book 3 isn't as great, and book 4 gets a little preachy at times, but fun to read. Makes me wonder about Yahoo's decision to name themselves after it; Yahoos represent a pretty cynical, misanthropic view of humanity.

This is a fantastical satire that uses the ancient method of a journey (in this case multiple journeys) to foreign lands in the service of social satire and cultural commentary. The motivating force behind Gulliver's Travels is the author's apparent disgust with human folly and pretension; the ideas are embodied in grotesques and fantastic creatures, in the six-inch high Lilliputians, the gigantic Brobdingnagians, the horse-like Houyhnhnms and the disgusting Yahoos. These characters are so memorable that their names have become part of our culture. The journeys provide lessons for Lemuel Gulliver who is an honest if gullible narrator. Whether he learned the right lessons or ones that have value for others is for each reader to decided. However, concluding, he confesses that he could be reconciled to the English Yahoos "if they would be content with those Vices and Follies only which Nature hath entitled them to. I am not in the least provoked at the sight of a Lawyer, a Pick-pocket, a Colonel, a Fool, a Lord, a Gamster, a Politician, a Whoremunger, a Physician, . . . or the like: This is all according to the due Course of Things: but, when I behold a Lump of Deformity, and Diseases both in Body and Mind, smitten with Pride, it immediately breaks all the Measures of my patience."

Most people have seen a cinematic version of this book, right? Most already know the story without actually bothering with reading the book? The book was written nearly 300 years old so some of the little of the language will be a little archaic but it's only a kids book so will be an easy read. Given the age of the story it will have very little relevance with events of today.

Well at least that is what I thought beforehand. How very wrong I was!

For those of you who do not know the story Gulliver basically visits four islands, one populated by a lot of little people, the next by some giants, then moving on to a flying island before finally landing on one ruled by horses where humens are the savages, something akin to the films Planet of the Apes but with horses rather than chimpanzees.

Firstly the title is something of a misnomer. Rather than describing happenings in far off fanciful lands Swift is really only interested in taking a satirical swipe at events and in particular the politics an awful lot closer to home,namely London. Swift's family was originally from England but had backed the losing side in the English Civil War whereupon having lost their lands there were forced to take up residence Ireland. Swift was born and educated in Dublin but moved from his birthplace to London as a young man and there he became very active in the politics of the day,firstly as a Whig sympathiser then as a Tory. However, when the hoped for preferments failed to materialize Swift was virtually exiled back to Ireland making him rather bitter towards the political elite back in London.

Some of the satire is fairly obvious, liking peeing on the palace in Lilliput to extinguish a fire there (in fact bodily functions seem to play a large part of the first two sections) but some other referances were I admit quite lost on me. Rather than travel broadening the mind it seemed to make Gulliver's more inward looking, so much so in the end he cannot bear the sight or touch of fellow humans, and this is probably where the book lost me as a fan. Personally I found the part on Laputa rather dull and very long-winded which was followed by the stay with the Houyhnhms which felt merely like the ramblings of a very bitter and disappointed in life man.

On the whole I found the book interesting but ultimately a little disappointing and I certainy enjoyed Lilliput the most.

This nearly 300 year old classic deserves its reputation, but it is a novel of two halves. The first two books of the four, in which Gulliver visits respectively Lilliput (very small people) and Brobdingnag (giants) are very good, funny, adventurous, imaginative and bawdy and would be worth 5/5 by themselves. However, I found the latter two books when he visits the flying island of Laputa and other lands; then in the final book, the land of the Houyhnhnms (intelligent horses subjugating primates who resemble degraded humans) duller and a lot harder to get through. They contain a lot of quite clever satire on the human condition and on civic life in Europe, but are rather overegged and over long, with little plot so rather a slog. 2/5 for the latter half, so overall 3.5/5.

Gulliver's Travels has some amusing and even a few insightful bits, but Swift was no Voltaire. A satire not so much on some particular human follies as on man as such, this book is basically a monument to misanthropy---as is made painfully clear in the heavy-handed fourth part. Not that satire has to be subtle, but it should at least be accurate, at most an exaggeration of the truth rather than a projection of one's own bitter prejudices. Swift's portrayal of human society, even as imperfect as it was (and even more so in his time than now), is at best one-sided. It ends with the narrator repulsed by the smell of his wife, and disgusted with himself for ever having couple with her and brought children into the world. If you can sympathize with that sentiment, then you might find Swift's satire to be penetrating and clever. If, on the other hand, you see any value in human life and hold it to be more important than the vice and suffering that necessarily characterize some part of it, then you might be better off reading something else.

I have been reading "Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift on my Ipod Touch for the last several months during the odd moments of time like waiting in line. The book is a novel in four parts about the travels of Lemuel Gulliver to various parts of the world. The book was a real surprise for me. I had always thought of it as a children's book. The classic scene is Gulliver tied up by the Lilliputian's until they figure out that he doesn't mean to harm them.

There is this vague sense that things are all great at the end.

Wrong! The Lilliptutan's are a bunch of small minded people and Gulliver soon ends up in trouble. First he puts out a fire in the Queen's castle by urinating on it, drenching the Queen. That makes her mad. Second, he helps the Lilliputan's in their long standing war against the island of Blefusco but refuses to help make Blefusco totally subservient to Lilliput. He is sentenced to be blinded as punishment for this treason so he escapes.

Next he winds up in the Kingdom of Brobdingnag where instead of being twelve times bigger than the inhabitants as he was in Lilliput,he is twelve times smaller. He is found by a farmer who displays him for money. Gulliver ends up in the royal court and then the story gets kind of kinky. He is used as a kind of a sexual plaything and is molested by the women of the court, including a sixteen your old girl. Gulliver writes about how disgusting the giant naked women are. This part was a hoot. I wouldn't read it as a bedtime story to your kids.

Gulliver leaves Brobdingnag and has several other adventures. His final destination is the Country of the Houyhnhnm. The Houyhnhnm are a kind of a horse shaped beings. Their are human's there called Yahoo who are looked down upon by the Houyhnhnm as being base and menial and not good for much. The Houyhnhnm are very advanced and rational and listen with dismay as Gulliver tells them about Europe and how governments are run.

Eventually Gulliver has to leave Houyhnhnm and return to England. At this point he has been transformed from the happy go lucky adventurer to a recluse, disgusted by all contact with humans, even with his wife, whom can hardly stand.

The book is a great read. Swift is very imaginative and has a great writing style. I give it four stars out of five. It''s a classic. I'm going to miss it.

Does anybody have a recommendation for another classic for me to read?

This book is one of the best examples of satire. Swift takes on a trip around the world to show us the problems right at home. Though some have criticized the end of the book, I found it to be the best part. We see the human race totally flipped upside down and it was the most eye-opening section of the book. I picked the book up because I thought it would be about an adventure, but it is so much more than that.

I can't help but wonder what a conversation with Mr. Swift might have been like. He is so overwhelmingly conscious of all the faults of human kind that it is almost depressing to come to the end of "Gulliver's Travels" and feel condemned to be such a Yahoo! Still, it must be admitted that his observations are truthful. One thing I found particularly interesting about the book was the bluntness with which Mr. Swift addresses such things as bodily functions - and the chapters about the Yahoos are quite distasteful if the reader stops to consider that Gulliver makes a boat using the skin and fat of humans, as well as articles of clothing and sails. Somehow, by assigning another name, and continually referring to Yahoos as brutes, Mr. Swift leads the reader to skim right past these details.

Gulliver’s Travels is a recount by Lumeul Gulliver of how he travels to different islands that are by no means ordinary. He begins by telling about himself. Gulliver is actually a man who, after losing his business on the mainland, becomes a surgeon for different ships, sometimes even being the captain of some ships. The first adventure takes place in Lilliput, an island inhabited by tiny human-like creatures. Gulliver arrives on the island through a shipwreck and wakes up bound to the ground. This is due to the people of Lilliput binding him to the ground. At first, they attack him when Gulliver seems to threaten them. After realizing that Gulliver won’t cause them harm, the Lilliput people bring food and drink to Gulliver. Taken to the capital city, he is introduced to the emperor, while Gulliver is flattered, who is entertained by Gulliver. As time follows, Gulliver is used as someone to help the Lilliput people fight against the Blefuscu people. The two have gone into a war due to the way the Blefuscu crack their eggs. While the Lilliput people were nice to Gulliver at first, he is convicted for treason after he puts out a fire in the royal palace. This leads to his punishments being shot in the eyes and then starved. Luckily, Gulliver is able to escape to Blefuscu and repair a boat, therefore being able to sail to the mainland. Gulliver arrives home and stays with his family for a bit before leaving again. This time he arrives on the island of Brobdingnag, a place where giants rule. At first kept as a pet, Gulliver is eventually taken to the queen. This results in Gulliver being an entertainer for the court and, though social life is easy, disgust for how large the people of Brobdingnag are. This enlarges pores and other physical flaws. With ignorance ruling the Brobdingnag people, Gulliver eventually leaves the island after a bird picks up his cage before dropping him into the ocean. This leads Gulliver to be picked up by pirates and staying on the floating island, Laputa. The people, though, are too out of touch with reality. With a small trip to places which have people such as Julius Caesar and immortals that prove that wisdom does not come with age, Gulliver ends up back in England. The final journey that Gulliver tells about is one in which he meets a group of intelligent horse people who, while beings friends with Gulliver, served by the human Yahoos. Unintelligent and causing distortions of humans for Gulliver, the Yahoos are a group of people that Gulliver would rather not be with. Though he wishes to stay on the island, Gulliver is forced to leave after the Houyhnhnms realize how Yahoo like he is. Regretful to leave, Gulliver is picked up by a Portuguese ship and taken back to the mainland.
I believe that the book was quite a good one. I think that though it had some good points and some bad points, it was overall a good book. I love the first person perspective that Jonathan Swift used. I think that the book would not be as good if it weren’t for this. I love how the book gives a good time perspective and has great description. The way the Gulliver is describing what is around him is very realistic and gives me a good idea of what it would be like to be there myself. The book is something I would certainly recommend to other people. Gulliver’s Travels is definitely a five star book.

The last time that I read this book, I must have been about nine years old. I would be fascinated to turn up that copy because it must have been heavily edited. This book is full of biting criticism of the failings of the human race and much too grown up for the average child.

A further point of interest is that whilst most people will know of Gulliver, they will talk of his trip to Lilliput and, just possibly to a land of giants: very few people speak of the other two lands visited - a city in the sky and a land where horse-like creatures rule. It is, however, to these two that I would imagine Swift would attribute the kernel of his tale. The horse people are very close to being the first si-fi book because it is clear that Swift is creating a race totally at variance with human beings.

Considering its age, the book has some remarkably prescient forecasts of modern living. I was struck by Laputa where Swift talks of language being cut and mauled in much the way that 'Text speak' does. I was also surprised by his decision to laud the Houyhnhnms to the extent whereby Gulliver is unable to settle back amongst his own kind: even today, I find myself bridling at such an attitude.

If your child has some bastardised version of this tale upon his or her bookshelf, then rip it away and wait until they reach maturity: it is a crime that this book has been reduced to kiddie fodder.

Swift's Gulliver's Travels was next. This book was a self narrated account of various travels by a man named Gulliver. Whether it be his first voyage and being ship wrecked to wake up in the world of tiny people (Lilliput) where the people had to give up a LOT of food to feed him, or how some of them wanted to kill him but didn't know what to do with his body if they did, to the world of GIANTS in the land of Brobdingnag where he was carried about in a box, how eagles fought to take him for food, how his owner, the farmer initially used him to make money by showing him off then he was owned by the queen, or when he was attacked by pirates and ending up in Laputa and Balnibarbi, or when he talked to all the historical figures in Glubbdubdrib just to find out they had lied to build themselves up, or when he went to Luggnaggians and Struldbrugs or Japan it was interesting how he used social commentary in this book. I guess that was the best part and the faciful ideas of other cultures, languages, and magnifying various aspects and governmental and occupational characteristics of people and character flaws that he saw in life. It was also interesting how he was driven to continue to travel and not stay with his family/wife so he continued to travel. He often worked as a doc aboard ship since his business failed. Overall, I would not rate this book very highly. I'd like to hear your ideas about it though and find out the things you found interesting in it. I’m sorry for being unclear in my last reply. I reread it and am embarrassed at the laziness in my writing. Basically what I was referring to was Swift’s juxtaposition of the two people groups, the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms. The Houyhnhnms were obviously Gulliver preferred people. He seemed, at least to me, to be content with their way of life, the stability and way of going about things. He put them on a pedestal for their intelligence, ability to reason, “ethics,” etc in spite of their problems. It was clear that Gulliver did not like the Yahoo’s way of life even though he resembled them most. He was repulsed by their characteristics and behaviors even though he was criticizing humanity. I did like the concept of “Not being a people that tell things that are not” and being truthful. I really took that whole section as Swift’s own self-deception of finding a group of people being above reproach. I too think that we are smart enough to not do horrible things yet we still do. I rated it lower because it was not the childhood book I thought it was but it was fun nontheless (as an adult).