Gulliver’s Travels was definitely my favourite work we studied this semester and to honour it I thought I would share my favourite moments from the book. Here goes, in no particular order:

1. Where we find out the King of Lilliput’s full name. Golbasto Momaren Evlame Gurdilo Shefin Mully Ully Gue is an awesome name and I would be so impressed if I casually mentioned this name in conversation sometime and the other person caught the reference. I used to play this game called Concentration, where two people have to take turn coming up with different names while following a beat. Whoever could keep it up the longest wins. If I could remember the King of Lilliput’s name, I would have eight names that can be legitimately used. If no one believed me I could just whisk out my copy of Gulliver’s Travels!
2. Gulliver’s utter inability to convince the King of Brobdinag of England’s virtues. The part I found the funniest is when Gulliver thinks that the guns and machines of England would impress the King because they are so powerful and received the opposite reaction wherein the King was horrified and deemed the items inhumane.
3. Basically every mention of the Houyhnhms language. At first I didn’t even realize that “Houyhnhms” mimicked what horses sound in real life, but afterward I learned about that characteristic, pronouncing the word pretty much made me smile every single time. It’s also amusing how Yahoo is tagged onto other Houyhnhm words to change the meaning into the negative.

There were a lot of other close contestants to those three, and if I had had more time I probably would have made a longer list. But that list is all there is now. I have a feeling I will be re-reading Gulliver’s Travels once in a while and my list of favourite moments will most likely expand with each reading. Swift sure wrote an entertaining and funny book.

It is hard to believe that four months passed so quickly! Here I am at home now with all my exams finished (but still working on school-work like this blog post due to my procrastination). It is just past midnight now, at the time when the bustling noise of life has finally settled down into a cozy silence. Before the busyness that will surely have me bursting out of bed tomorrow, I thought I would take some time to reminisce on what taking this course has done for me.

Honestly, I didn’t do as well as I had hoped to in this class. At the beginning of the semester I went through that wooden door in the Math Building marked 203 thinking that I would push myself to speak up in class, form defined opinions and analyze the text at my maximum capability but I admit I fell short of that goal. A favourite quote of mine is “Shoot for the moon, even if you miss at least you will land in the stars.” I think that in this case, I probably reached the tip of one of the trees in the UBC endowment lands.

That being said, I still learned. Going back to the first post I wrote for this blog, the epiphany I described there about slow reading is a lesson that has stayed with me. It’s just that recognizing I needed to think more did not directly translate to thinking more. I did try to reach farther in analysis for my second essay, but it was evident that what I did then wasn’t enough. I am extremely glad for the day I went to talk to Prof. McNeilly about the term paper that afternoon because I think I came away with a better idea of how to analyze deeper and express that in writing.

After four tiring but thought-provoking months in this class I am grateful to have grown mentally a little bit and I do love Gulliver’s Travels. That book is so much more than I expected and so funny. I hope I get to revisit it in another English class and it was a great way to end the semester. =)