• GULLIVER’S TRAVELS
• by Jonathan Swift
• [rated by PBS readers as #75]
• 286 pages

[ NOTE TO ALL OF YOU FROM CYNTHIA – I’m so sorry that I have dropped the ball so badly and waiting so long between postings. I have continued to read but the shelter in place has allowed me to let some things fall between the cracks.

But I want to fix that. Hopefully, you will get more of these from me and faster. That way I can hopefully keep you on this journey with me and we will journey forward together, in real time. That’s the plan anyway.

This way, even if I don’t know where I am in my journey, you’ll be there with me! Cheers! And now, back to Gulliver.]

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Well, I’m  60+ pages in and  I find it a good story. I can’t help reflecting that even the author would be astonished that it has stood the test of time this long. But yet, it is interesting and well told and I’m drawn to continuing it, despite the hard going of some of the reading. And when I say hard going, it isn’t really. It’s just that if the descriptions get too long, my mind starts wandering and I have to get my book mark up, to help me stay focused.

So yeah. Hard.

Visual stuff is usually the hardest for me and I can really see this one. I’m also delighted that Lilliput is the only story I’ve ever heard about and it starts with that, which felt like a real treat, though now we are journeying off to somewhere else.

I have been through a fair amount of these books already that I continue to read despite any inclination to go to them each time. No real pull. It is more my commitment to the project than my interest in the story. But I do want to know what happens to Gulliver and I have no idea what is to come next.

I believe that this has, over time, become more of a kid’s book, though I don’t think that was Swift’s original intent. With that in mind, though, his preoccupation with peeing and pooping are tailor made for an audience younger than me!

Still waiting on Dorian Gray and looking forward to it, but this is an entertainment in the interim.

7/29/19 – OVER HALF WAY THROUGH…

WHY OH FUCKING WHY CAN I NOT SKIM?

I’ve never been able to. It is purely irrational, but I always think I’m going to miss something deeply important. Even in the last five minutes of the worst film you have ever seen. There I am till the end. Sad.

This started out perky enough. I was glad that he started with the little people story and as I wrote before, it was quite visual and entertaining. Then the big people came. That was visual and entertaining too. But how to follow that up? The third idea was creative, I guess, but at this point, I had ceased to care.

Okay, for one thing, each Gulliver voyage and subsequent enslavement comes with a tiny little story and then BIG CHUNKY sections of Swift’s diatribe about what was wrong with this nation and how these idiots in whatever land couldn’t see how crazy their thinking was.

Wait a minute! Could he mean OUR thinking? How dog gone sneaky was that?!

About as sneaky as cement boots.

So now I’ve dwindled down to 3 pages in a sitting. I do want to finish Gulliver’s Travels. I WILL finish Gulliver’s Travels. I’ve come all this way.

But I have ceased to care about Gulliver or any tiny detail of his travels about 50 pages ago and I have over a hundred pages to go.

You have to wonder if the people who voted for this were voting from their very distant memories. Let’s listen in to their minds…

“I loved that when I was a kid!”

“How long ago was that?”

“Gosh, I can’t remember. 50 years, maybe?”

I’m a simpleton reader. Really! I want pace. I have a million things going on in my life. I want to pick up a book and get lost in it. Pace does that. Little else comes close.

I’m lost in this one all right. Lost in the head. But I will follow each page down till I’m done because God forbid, I should miss something!

8/6/19

Sadly, with Gulliver, I am now officially in the midst of my most difficult book to date. To say I am using a bookmark is an understatement. I have been going down each page with it, line for line, forcing myself to keep reading. Oy. This thing is tough.

We are in the fourth voyage of Gulliver and everything is just wrong. Only about sixty pages left and it feels like a thousand to go.

First of all no one – of sound mind and body – by this point gives a shit about this character. He has no personality. He is constantly stuck in these cultures where he tells the head guy everything about his culture.

WHO IN THE FUCK CARES?

It might have been amusing or prescient early on, but from where I live, this opus doesn’t build to ANYTHING! Each trip is separate, he goes home, spends five minutes with the wife and kids and then sets off yet another time to see if he can get captured and imprisoned again. He says he wants to see the world. Hasn’t he gotten the point yet?

He is a loser! Yeah! I’ll say it! Gulliver is a loser!

Nothing he has done has been a winning move, so he pursues his dream of being someone’s stooge for another couple of years. But oh, just think of the hours of worthless discourse they can rattle through together…

I picture that his wife now gets the picture. When he says he is off for another adventure, she correctly interprets that to mean that he is off to become someone else’s prisoner or oddity and that, because he always ends up in captivity, he won’t be home for a couple of years. This has become oddly comforting to her so she doesn’t even look up.

“Have a good trip, dear,” she calls out with no particular inflection or intensity. “Take your time. We’ll be here.”

In our fourth thrilling Gulliver story that I’m now slogging through, our protagonist is surrounded by talking horses. Wow! Golly. Give me Mr. Ed any day of the week!

One can only hope that this horse story will take a nasty turn, Gulliver will fall in love with one and attempted intimacy will lead to his untimely death. But I have no illusions. No way am I gonna get that lucky.

To go from Hatchet, where there wasn’t an extra word in all of it, to this, where every single word is unnecessary is just dictionary depressing. Pure and simple.

Gulliver, take your tired prisoner ass and sail out of my life.

8/11/19

Mother of God, I’m finally done.. So glad that I could laugh and cry at the same time with relief, but alas. I’m still feeling the utter boredom of finishing this, so I am drained of all human emotion.

Will I look back on Gulliver later with less revulsion. Probably. I’d just about have to. Revulsion meter is spiking right about now.

I’m about to go on my writing vacation, so I’m employing the same rules as my trip to Italy – I can drink or eat sweets if I want to and I’m going to read something pulpy and fun while there.

But Dorian Gray has been staring at me ever since he arrived at my local bookstore, Damn, he looks good for his age!… So he will be in the running as soon as I start up again, along with three other mystery titles.

Till then.