I’m really enjoying this, my first read of GT. When I was reading the first page though, I was thinking, “Uh oh, I’m not sure if I can get through this.” It was more the style of writing than the content that I wasn’t sure I liked. Glad I stuck with it. These summaries are very enlightening as well.
That's understandable. When you realize that much of the humor comes from Gulliver's bland style in relation to the outrageous events, things begin to click.
The book is not my cup of tea, but I summarize some of the ridiculous events for my eight year old granddaughter and she laughs. She also is fascinated by the posted pictures. You have a very young fan on this journey.,
All this is much more scatological than the pretty cartoon I remember seeing as a child, where the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu was over which song to sing at the wedding of the princess of Lilliput to the prince of Blefuscu. [I had read the Companion Library version of the book, so I already knew the cartoon was different than the book, but the Companion Library version for young people was sanitized of the ruder passages.]
It strikes me that Swift's satire is double edged. Take the Big and Little Endian satire of Catholic and Protestant differences - Gulliver is the narrator and his perspective is warped. The satire seems to be directed not only toward the excesses of the Catholic and Protestant conflict, but also toward those who regard the underlying differences as having no more significance than which end to break an egg.
N.B.: As a Canadian child, I didn't at all understand why anyone would break an egg at one end or the other. To my mind, if you were breaking an uncooked egg to fry it or use it in baking, you cracked it in the middle of the shell and pulled the two halves apart . If you were breaking the shell of a hardboiled egg, you cracked it all over and peeled it. It wasn't until I saw an English breakfast depicted in film that I realized that the soft boiled egg (an abomination in my family) could be eaten by opening the shell at one end and scooping the contents out with a spoon.
I’m really enjoying this, my first read of GT. When I was reading the first page though, I was thinking, “Uh oh, I’m not sure if I can get through this.” It was more the style of writing than the content that I wasn’t sure I liked. Glad I stuck with it. These summaries are very enlightening as well.
That's understandable. When you realize that much of the humor comes from Gulliver's bland style in relation to the outrageous events, things begin to click.
The book is not my cup of tea, but I summarize some of the ridiculous events for my eight year old granddaughter and she laughs. She also is fascinated by the posted pictures. You have a very young fan on this journey.,
Ha! That makes me happy.
All this is much more scatological than the pretty cartoon I remember seeing as a child, where the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu was over which song to sing at the wedding of the princess of Lilliput to the prince of Blefuscu. [I had read the Companion Library version of the book, so I already knew the cartoon was different than the book, but the Companion Library version for young people was sanitized of the ruder passages.]
It strikes me that Swift's satire is double edged. Take the Big and Little Endian satire of Catholic and Protestant differences - Gulliver is the narrator and his perspective is warped. The satire seems to be directed not only toward the excesses of the Catholic and Protestant conflict, but also toward those who regard the underlying differences as having no more significance than which end to break an egg.
N.B.: As a Canadian child, I didn't at all understand why anyone would break an egg at one end or the other. To my mind, if you were breaking an uncooked egg to fry it or use it in baking, you cracked it in the middle of the shell and pulled the two halves apart . If you were breaking the shell of a hardboiled egg, you cracked it all over and peeled it. It wasn't until I saw an English breakfast depicted in film that I realized that the soft boiled egg (an abomination in my family) could be eaten by opening the shell at one end and scooping the contents out with a spoon.