Gulliver's Travels

1726
Jonathan Swift
Gulliver's Travels
B

While the misanthropy keeps this from being a great book, it also drives the satire.  The Lilliput adventure is best known, although in high school I think I was most drawn to the mockery of the pseudointellectuals of Laputa.  At the time, this collection (the short works even more so) was probably the most obscene thing I'd ever read, and having now moved on to the 1740s, the way that four-letter words are bluntly thrown around here still startles.  (Changes in censorship and/or mores in the England of George I and that of George II)?  Also, while most of Swift's worlds are dystopias, or at least places you might want to visit but not live in, it is striking how even in the "perfect" land of the Houyhnhnms (which I pronounce in my head as "homonyms" just to get through that section), there are such things as race and class, with certain breeds of horses working as servants.  And, yes, this is the novel where the word "Yahoo" (for "stupid human") comes from.