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Saturday, October 20, 2012

Gulliver's Travels

I'm going to preface this whole thing by saying this: if you are not an extreme bibliophile, you probably won't like this book.

Gulliver's Travels is split into four sections. In each of these sections, you learn about Gulliver's experiences with different groups of people: the Lilliputians, the Brobdingnagians, the Laputans, and the Houyhnhnms. He ends up in each of these societies when he is either shipwrecked or abandoned.

There are a lot of tough words (and I read this to my toddler), especially once you get to the fourth part. Swift used a lot of nonsense words that have to be defined in the book. It's also somewhat satirical about the British empire. It's not always explicit that he is making some sort of statement about the government of England, but they're there if you look deep enough (and know Jonathan Swift's works).

So, I'd mostly just recommend this to English majors and extreme bibliophiles. I enjoyed it for the most part, but I'm both an English major and a bibliophile.

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