"Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift

Did you know that this book doesn't actually end when Gulliver leaves Lilliput?

Well, it doesn't. Lilliput (the land of the tiny people) is just Part 1, and there are three others. I suspect that Lilliput may be the famous one because by the time most people get through it, they've had about enough Gulliver's Travels for one lifetime.

(Also, the Lilliputians are supposed to be like six inches tall, so they're usually drawn much smaller than they're acutally supposed to be.)

Part 2 is in Brobdingnag, which is the opposite of Lilliput: it's full of giants. Their society is apparently so much more perfect than 1700s England that Jonathan Swift (through Gulliver) feels the need to spend multiple chapters expounding upon this.

Part 3 doesn't confine itself to one fictional society, instead moving rapidly (for this book, at least) through the following:

-Laputa, an island city-state (of normal-sized people!) that flies using a giant magnet. They're good at astronomy and geometry, and almost nothing else.

-Balnibarbi, Laputa's vassal state. They aren't even good at astronomy or geometry. They are in fact an incredibly obvious satire of 1700s science, hence the utterly ridiculous science projects they get up to.

-Glubbdubdrib, an island with magicians (the kind who summon ghosts). Gulliver spends a while talking to the ghosts of random famous dead people, and we get to see Jonathan Swift fanboy over Brutus for a few paragraphs.

-Luggnagg, the most normal of the made-up islands. Its only quirk is that it has people who don't die of old age, but they do age normally so that's not as awesome as you (or Gulliver) might think.

-And finally, Japan, which is literally just Japan. We spend like one chapter there.

And Part 4 involves Gulliver's journey to the land of the Houyhnhnms. It doesn't have an actual name, it's just called the land of the Houyhnhnms. In this land, horses (also known as Houyhnhnms) are sentient and humans (also known as Yahoos) aren't. We spend frankly too much time lampooning modern 1700s European society and comparing it to the much more perfect and truly beautiful utopian society of the Houyhnhnms, and using Yahoos as stand-ins for all the vices Jonathan Swift thinks are ruining the world.

If you ever wondered where the term Yahoo comes from, look no further. It's from this. 

Gulliver's Travels is occasionally oddly prescient (among other things, it did predict magnetic levitation and the moons of Mars), and it should be cut a bit of slack for being one of the first books about entirely made-up places and societies. However, it's also long and mostly rather boring. The biting social satire was mildly interesting in Lilliput, and got increasingly dull with each subsequent new land full of people who symbolize what Jonathan Swift doesn't like.

Let no-one say that nobody ever goes to the bathroom in books, for in this one, people do indeed go to the bathroom. Let no-one also say that said bathroom-going is a point in this book's favor.

I should probably also mention that this Book is written in the older Style of the English Language, wherein all Nouns are begun with capital Letters (as German Nouns are in this Age), and all foreign Words and most proper Nouns are set in Italics. That Style took me some Time before I acclimated to its Difference from the Style of the modern Day.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: I think T15+ for crude humor, violence, sexual references, and nudity (including one rather bizarre section where {T15+ a bunch of Brobdingnag women use Gulliver as a sort of pseudo-sex-toy}). If that section weren't in there, it would probably be T.

2 stars. It's not that the biting satire of 1700s European society isn't fun, but... actually, the biting satire of 1700s European society isn't fun. I'm glad to be done with it. I'm also confused as to why this is on a puzzle of children's books (from which I took my first completed quest), because it gets increasingly less appropriate-for-children after we leave Lilliput. Maybe the people who designed the puzzle didn't realize that the Lilliput sections, which are reasonably family-friendly, weren't the entire book.

(Endnote: I shall now say "Houyhnhnm" and "Yahoo" several times until they lose all meaning.)