I'm glad that I read this, but it was a bit of a slog by the second half. The story is divided into 4 parts. The first two are the ones that everyone is familiar with: the lands of the little people and the big people (Lilliput and Brobdingnag). These were the most interesting. The third land Gulliver visits is Laputa, the floating island of musicians and mathematicians who can't do anything practical with their knowledge. The last land is the country of the Houyhnhnms, horse people with no understanding of the concept of lying, war, or disease.

What you may not know is that between these visits he returns home to his wife and family, and then opts to once again go to sea. While he is home he tells people about his trips too. Knowing how superstitious sailors were, I can't imagine any of them having Gulliver on their ship. The real kicker is the forth voyage, where Gulliver is the CAPTAIN?!? Who was dumb enough to give this man a ship?!? Granted he wasn't shipwrecked the last time, his crew mutinied and abandoned him on an unknown island!!

If I was Gulliver, after the first time I was shipwrecked on a weird land, sure, maybe I'd try my luck a second time. But a third and forth time?!? Really?!? What point does one need to reach before giving up on ever successfully completing an ocean voyage?

I also did not realize that this story was as much satire as it was a fantastic story. It was written to make fun of both travel logs of the time and also of his society as a whole. By the end of the book, Gulliver, after living with these nearly perfect horses, can't even stand the company of his family.

I get what Swift was doing, but it's really hard to appreciate almost 300 years later. I haven't read travel logs from the early 1700's, and the satire of his own society was terribly heavy handed, especially at the end.