octavia_cade 's review for:

The Annotated Gulliver's Travels by Isaac Asimov, Jonathan Swift

3.0

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I've had a long and difficult history with this book. To be honest, I've spent most of my life thinking that I loathe it. I had a copy as a kid, you see - not the actual book, but a heavily cut-down, heavily illustrated version meant for young readers, and I remember thinking even then that it was the silliest, most boring thing I'd ever read. I moved into the original text as a teen - the book was so famous, there had to be something I was missing - and was confirmed in my opinion. Tried it again ten years later, I'm not sure I even finished it then. It's stuck in my mind, ever since, as the very definition of a tedious read.

Well, I must be a glutton for punishment, because I've read the thing now for the fourth time and I can finally say that I like it. Not enough to ever read it again, but I'm satisfied that I appreciate it for what it is: vicious, biting satire in which Swift took his revenge upon the people he disliked. I'd always vaguely understood the thing was satirical, but I lacked the historical context to really appreciate just what and who Swift was bitching about. (I much preferred his baby-eating pamphlet, which was blatantly obvious and clearly more my speed.) But the copy I've read now is one that's enormously annotated. It's a substantial book, filled with illustrations of previous editions of Gulliver, and each page is split into halves, with one half original text and the other annotated explanation. For someone who had only a very vague idea as to the Whigs and the Tories (and the political machinations in general) of Swift's time, it makes things so much clearer. And genuinely more interesting. The satire has layers now.

I'm still never reading it again. I'm sorry Mr. Swift, I own I did misjudge you, but four times is three times too many.