Gulliver's Travels

This book taught me that great satire spares no one. It’s not about one group in society or one ideology—it skewers all of them equally, one after another until we see the flaws in human nature that underlie all of them. You could say it’s a very pessimistic book, but I didn’t read it that way.

Seeing your shortcomings, individual or social, is the first step to overcoming them.

I love this book because it’s a satirical work that still feels relevant 300 years later. Both a whimsical parody of travel books and a dark satire on human nature, I love the book’s creativity: it features everything from poop scientists to talking horses and flying islands.

As with most early novels, the name of the author, Jonathan Swift, appears nowhere in the book—it was published as if the main character, Lemuel Gulliver, were the author. I love how the book is alternately audacious and subtle; Swift is extremely faithful to the dry style of the travel books he parodies,… show more.

In the most elegant piss-take on the travel writing genre ever crafted, Swift’s hero traverses lands impossibly strange and, well, just impossible, giving satire a whole new modus operandus: expanding the cosmos!

Whenever I start to feel blue about living in an era that seems to underrate imaginativeness – especially in literature, I go back to Swift, who always reminds me that there is a path veering toward the limitless, and that path will never disappear. 

In my own writing, I love leaning in to world building and satire and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver is a master class in both. For those whose knowledge of this classic is limited to kid-friendly animated abridgments set exclusively in Lilliput, let me tell you it is so much more, very little of it kid-friendly. Take, for instance, how Gulliver pisses off Lilliput’s queen while saving her from a burning tower – by peeing out the flames. And then there’s Swift's take on immortality (one of my favorite of Rice’s themes). Unlike her immortal fanged beauties, however, Swift’s immortals are not… show more.

The standard bearer of idiotic journeys. This eighteenth-century funhouse mirror displays the underbelly of the human condition from many absurd angles, including but not limited to xenophobic violence, intellectual hubris, and false idol worship.