Your book only covers Part I of Gulliver's Travels . But there are 3 more parts and I'm going to tell you the rest of the story. Want to hear about a land of giants? Or how about an island that floats in air? There's another land where horses are in charge. Get ready for three more adventures with Gulliver!
After leaving Lilliput and arriving home, Gulliver sets out on another journey by ship. After a terrible storm Gulliver goes to the shore of a new country with some of the ship's men to search for water. While he is exploring he sees something he has never seen before: giants. In Lilliput Gulliver had been the giant, but here in Brobdingnag Gulliver is just as small to its inhabitants as the Lilliputians had been to him.
A farmer finds Gulliver in a corn field and takes him home. Imagine being so small that someone could carry you in their hand—that's not hard for me to imagine, but then, I'm a hamster. While Gulliver is living with the farmer he has to fight two giant rats that attack him and he kills one of them. I never liked rats. Very bad breath and very stinky feet. The farmer puts Gulliver to work. He takes him to many, many towns and makes people pay money to see him. Gulliver walks around on a table in front of the giant people, bowing and swinging his sword and he does many performances everyday—so many that he starts to feel very tired and it looks as if he might die. So the farmer sells him to the King and Queen of Brobdingnag.
There his life is better. The King and Queen treat him well. They even make him a little boat to sail in. The King asks Gulliver all kinds of questions about his country. Gulliver tells him about the government and wars and military weapons and lawyers and what his people in England are like. The King is not impressed. He thinks the people Gulliver lives with are terrible. He calls them "odious vermin" and believe me that is not a compliment!
When Gulliver travels he lives in a little box, not little to him—to him it's the size of a room. One day when he is traveling around the country he feels his box lifted up into the air. An eagle grabbed it. The eagle carries him away and drops him over the ocean where he is picked up by a ship from his country. Gulliver goes home again, but do you think he's going to stay there? No way!
Gulliver's third adventure also begins on a ship, but this one is eventually captured by pirates and Gulliver is set adrift on the wide ocean in a canoe. Luckily he finds many islands and on one of these islands while he is exploring he sees a very strange site: a huge island floating in the sky. It's inhabited by people—the Laputians. They let down a ladder and Gulliver climbs up into Laputa. And the people—boy, are they weird! The men think so much and so hard about mathematics and art that they have servants who have to whack them with a Flapper on their mouths and ears just to get their attention so someone can talk to them. This Flapper is a long stick that has a rattle on the end of it. Even when these great thinkers walk somewhere their servants have to whack them on the eyes so they'll watch where they're going. Whack, whack, whack, whack! I never met a hamster that had to be whacked.
These people are so smart that they can't make clothes that fit. Their houses, on the land below, are all crooked and slanted and falling down and their teachers invent all kinds of ways of doing things that just don't work. One teacher builds houses, but tries to build them starting with the roof. That doesn't work. Another professor tries to get sunbeams out of cucumbers. He'd been working on that for eight years. Still another professor, who couldn't get his sundial to work, was trying to change the way the earth and sun moved. Ha! Good luck on that one, buddy! Have you ever thought it was hard to learn something? Well, one of the professors was trying to teach his students by writing a fact on a very gross smelling and tasting piece of paper. He made his students eat only bread and water for three days and then they had to eat that piece of paper which he said would put the fact into the brain. It never worked because the students got sick after they ate it and threw up all over the place. Yuck!
Gulliver meets all kinds of people on this adventure: he gets to meet people from history like Homer and Aristotle who were ancient Greeks. He also meets the Struldbruggs. These are people who never have to die, unfortunately they are old for their entire lives and they not happy or nice. They're grumpy. Gulliver decides it would better to die than live like them. Finally, Gulliver goes home again and like before he can't keep still. He decides to go on one last journey.
On this ship there is a mutiny and Gulliver is left in another country—another strange country. The first creatures he meets are dirty and grimy and hairy. They almost look like apes, but Gulliver soon discovers that they are humans just like himself. He also discovers that the most intelligent creatures in this land are horses. They call themselves Houyhnhnms. The Houyhnhnms call humans Yahoos and the Yahoos are disgusting creatures. They are selfish and mean and filthy. The Houyhnhnms use them to do work for them, like Gulliver's people in his country use horses.
Gulliver loves the Houyhnhnm that keeps him in his home and the horse cannot believe that Gulliver is a human, a Yahoo, because Gulliver can talk and think and reason. The Horses are very good creatures. They do not even have a word for lying because they never lie. Unfortunately for Gulliver the rest of Houyhnhnms decide he must leave their country because he is a Yahoo. Gulliver doesn't want to leave because he learned so much about being a better person from the Houyhnhnms. He doesn't want to go back to his country and live with Yahoos who lie and cheat and steal. But he has to and when he gets home he doesn't even want to smell the people who live around him or even his family because he thinks they are all dirty, disgusting Yahoos. He stuffs leaves up his nose to keep from smelling any humans and he makes his wife sit at the far end of the table.
I think Gulliver went too far. I mean, I'd never want to be a human, but even though there are some bad things about people, there are also a lot of good things too. Anyway, Gulliver didn't take any trips after that though he did buy a couple of horses.
