Gulliver's Travels
Narrated by Andrew Bond
Gulliver's Travels follows a shipwrecked ship's surgeon through four strange lands, in Jonathan Swift's satirical adventure read slowly for sleep.
Lemuel Gulliver keeps setting out to sea, and keeps ending up somewhere he never planned. First he washes ashore in Lilliput, where people no taller than his finger tie him down with hundreds of threads and go to war over which end of an egg to crack. Next he sails to Brobdingnag, a land of giants, where he becomes a curiosity carried around in a box, small and helpless for once instead of the other way around.
Later voyages take him to the floating island of Laputa, ruled by thinkers so lost in their own calculations they barely notice the ground beneath them, and finally to the country of the Houyhnhnms, wise and gentle horses who govern over the brutish, filthy Yahoos. Each landing turns Gulliver's world upside down and pushes him to look again at his own country, its wars, its politics, and its pride.
It's a satirical adventure dressed up as a traveler's tale, part fantastical voyage and part sharp commentary on human vanity and the small quarrels people mistake for large ones. Listeners who enjoy political satire, tall tales, and strange imagined worlds — the same pull as Voltaire's Candide or the topsy-turvy logic of Alice in Wonderland — will find plenty to enjoy here.
Andrew Bond's steady, calm voice carries you from giants to tiny kingdoms without ever rushing. Let Gulliver's far-off islands ease you down, one strange shore at a time.
