Wichita State English professor Katie Lanning is the greatest living expert on "Gulliver’s Travels." Wellllll, she owns more copies than anyone we know. She tells us why on today’s Why Should I Read This.
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A lot of people think they know Jonathan Swift's book, Gulliver's Travels: guy stranded on an island of tiny people. Some nerds may even know about part two, when Gulliver gets stranded on an island of giant people. Even bigger nerds know about part four, when Gulliver meets some talking horses. But only the absolute nerdiest among us, a group I am so painfully proud to be a part of, remember part three, when Gulliver is taken to an academy of useless projects and shown the word machine, an engine that somehow dazzles everyone by scrambling language into nonsense.
Swift was mocking his fellow writers, but doesn't it also sound like a jab at those who call AI the future? That's Swift in a nutshell, or a nutshell in a Swift which, by the way, is such a wildly niche swift joke that if you get it, you have to tell me. But this is why I love this book. It's weird, it's snarky, and it's still surprisingly relevant.
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If you decide to read Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, Dr. Lanning recommends the Oxford World's Classics edition, ISBN 9780199536849.
