Just Finished Reading Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels

A few days ago, I finished reading Jonathan Swift's classic novel, titled Gulliver's Travels.  Because it came out in 1725, nearly 300 years ago, I feared that the language might be a little too antiquated...but it turns out that Swift's writing is easy to follow.  Most people who haven't read Gulliver's Travels are aware that Gulliver is a sea-goer who gets himself shipwrecked on a strange island...and wakes up to find himself bound and surrounded by minuscule people: the Lilliputians.  But that's just the first part of his odysseys into fanciful lands populated, not just by the diminutive Lilliputians, but also by the ultra-giant Brobdingnags, the Laputans with their floating capital, the Balnirabi with their ridiculous, pointless science projects, the Luggnaggs with their shunned and pitied immortals, the Glubbdubdribs with their ability to drum up ghosts...any ghost you'd want to converse with, and finally, the Houyhnhnms, horses who within their domain replace humans (which they call "Yahoos") as the intelligent, reasoning species.  Because of the funny-sounding names Swift imagined for these "peoples", reading aloud can contribute greatly to the effect of his writing...and it can lead to uncontrollable fits of laughter, especially when Lemeul Gulliver (a physician by profession) goes off in a laudatory rant about the esteemed and superior Houyhnhnms.

I have read that there is a lot of satire in Gulliver's Travels, and I'm sure that Swift had different groups in mind when he wrote about various societies that his hero encountered.  But there is a punch line to his satire: after Gulliver discovers and reveals the various down-sides to these very disparate cultures, he tries to convince the Houyhnhnms how reasonable his own English culture is and that they should be regarded as equals.  Only one problem: as Gulliver goes on describing his own society, he finds himself continually criticizing it and exposing its many injustices and flaws.  Finally, he sees that his own native world is just as bad as the strange ones he had encountered previously.  Upon returning to England at the end, he can't adjust to even being in the presence of his fellow humans, much less interacting with them...

I was pleasantly surprised with Gulliver's Travels.  Not only did it crack me up with its humor, but its sobering description of Swift's contemporary English society still holds up nearly three centuries later with ours of today.  I don't think you'd regret it if you found a copy of this book and read it...