Month: March 2025

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Gulliver’s Travels, originally published in 1727, is in the public domain. Using the Android Kindle app on my phone, I read the AmazonClassics ebook shown above, which I downloaded during the Covid lockdowns when Amazon made a bunch of classic ebooks available to download for free. However, this Amazon ebook does not include the illustration in Part 3, Chapter 5 of the automatic writing machine, which features in another blog post of mine. I therefore recommend the Standard Ebooks version of Gulliver’s Travels, which does include this illustration, and which, moreover, is free. (Standard Ebooks offers a growing selection of Gutenberg ebooks that have been noticeably improved in terms of proofreading, typesetting, cover design, etc. All free.)

Where does Gulliver go? Are his travels funny? What’s Jonathan Swift trying to say, anyway? (Do I even like satire at all?) Does the book resemble the 1939 animated film adaptation? Find the answers to these questions below.

Continue reading Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

When and Why I Read Gulliver's Travels

I know a little about Gulliver's Travels by cultural osmosis, but that's not the same as having actually read it! I know that Lilliputian means 'diminutive' because Lilliput is a place full of small people who famously tie Gulliver down (and that brobdingnagian means 'huge' because Brobdingnag is a place full of huge people). I've heard of houyhnhnms, and about some kind of mechanical word machine that people use for writing. It's time to fill in the gaps.

Genre: English literature / satire
Date started / date finished: 10-Mar-25 to 17-Mar-25
Length: 306 pages
ISBN: B073WW8W3R
Originally published in: 1726/2017
Amazon link: Gulliver's Travels

She: A History of Adventure by H. Rider Haggard

How did I come to read this book?

I read Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne because it’s on a lot of lists of classic books, and I’ve read other top Verne books, but not this one.

Then, because I somehow thought Journey to the Center of the Earth had more dinosaurs in it, I read The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, which is possibly the one I was thinking of.

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle made me think of Michael Crichton’s novels The Lost World and also Congo, which I read in 2010.

Congo was (according to Wikipedia) inspired by King Solomon’s Mines, a novel by H. Rider Haggard, which I’ve also repeatedly seen on lists of classic books, so I read King Solomon’s Mines.

Then, because the novel She is by the same author as King Solomon’s Mines, and I’ve seen it on lists of classics (some indicating that it was an early science-fiction or early feminist novel), I read it too.

Phew!

Overall impression? What a creepy story. Really not my style.

There were some interesting psychological/philosophical observations, and some poetic, if melancholy, descriptive passages, but mainly the atmosphere was, in general, unpleasantly macabre. The physical surroundings of the characters consisted almost entirely of caves and tombs, except when the characters were traveling on stormy seas or across mosquito-infested swamps. There is no joy in this book whatsoever; the survival of the narrator is a matter of narrow escape—of relief rather than victory. But maybe that’s the point? Reading the book is like passing through a haunted house: you frighten yourself thoroughly with impossibilities, and then return to the real world with a new appreciation for normalcy.

So yeah. Well done, H. Rider Haggard. Thanks, I hate it.

See below for some more specific observations on this unsettling book from 1886.

Continue reading She: A History of Adventure by H. Rider Haggard

When and Why I Read She: A History of Adventure

This is the other famous book by the author of King Solomon's Mines.

Genre: classic adventure
Date started / date finished: 28-Feb-25 to 08-Mar-25
Length: 245 pages
ISBN:
Originally published in: 1886/2006/2020