We would sit down, and think which way
I finished Gulliver’s Travels on Friday night. I haven’t posted about it until now because I was in Vancouver with Meg all weekend, and only just recently got home.
Vancouver was fun — had some good food, saw some neat parts of the city, got to see some old friends and their 4 kids and just generally had a good time.
As far as the book goes, I enjoyed it. I think I missed some amount of the much-discussed political commentary, although some was pretty clear (and also fairly relevant still today, which is actually not particularly surprising).
I think I understand why movie and animated versions of the story generally omit the last 2 sections of the book — while equally interesting, well-written, etc, the second two sections have much more involved situations than the first two, and it would be pretty counter-productive to try to express those on the big screen. As everybody (I hope) already knows, the first 2 places Gulliver visits are are a land where everything is very small, and then a land where everything is very big. After that, he visits a land where people are effete intellectuals, eat food cut into geometrical shapes, and develop vast and useless machines. Later he visits a man who can conjure ghosts and spends a night talking to various famous historical figures. This kind of thing would be possible to put on a screen, but it would be orders of magnitude more difficult than just using some forced perspective and clever editing to show tons of really small people.
Anyways, it’s a good book. Go read it.
My book now is called The Privateer, book 1 in the 5-book Privateers & Gentlemen series by Jon Williams. So far I like it.
You didn’t even mention the Houynms. Hohynums. Younums.
The horses.
That list of “other places he went where things were difficult to envision” was getting too long and its addition didn’t help anything.
Also, Houyhnhnm.