The children's abridgements stop at Lilliput, where the book has barely started. Book Four is the one that will do something to you.

There is a version of this made for children and it stops after Lilliput, which is roughly like a King Lear that ends before anybody reaches the heath. Generations have therefore grown up believing they have read a whimsical fantasy about a big man and some little men. What they have read is the first quarter of a systematic assault on the proposition that human beings are reasonable, and it gets worse in every direction as it proceeds.

Book One is the political satire and it's the most dated, because you need footnotes to know that the high heels and low heels are Tories and Whigs and that Flimnap is Walpole. Fine. It's funny anyway. The business with the eggs is one of the great jokes about religious schism and it survives without annotation.

Book Two inverts the telescope, Gulliver becomes the small thing, and Swift immediately notices what nobody else would have noticed, which is skin. Close up, the Brobdingnagian women are a horror of pores and hairs and smells. That passage in chapter 5 does more damage to a reader's vanity than any sermon of the period.

Book Three is the weakest and I'll say so. Laputa, the projectors, the Struldbrugs. The Academy of Lagado material is very funny if you know what the Royal Society was up to in the 1710s and merely odd if you don't. But the Struldbrugs, the immortals who go on ageing, are the bleakest invention in the whole book and I'd forgive Book Three for them alone.

Then Book Four. The Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos and the slow catastrophe of Gulliver's mind. The critical fight over this has been running for three centuries: is the horse society the ideal, or a cold parody of the ideal, and is Gulliver at the end a man who has seen the truth or a man who has lost his reason? My answer, for what it's worth, is that Swift set the trap so that either answer indicts you, and the evidence is the final chapter, where Gulliver cannot bear the smell of his own wife and buys horses to sit with. That is no one's idea of achieved wisdom. It is also not simply a lunatic, because everything he says about human beings is, within the book's terms, accurate.

Editions. I use Oxford World's Classics with Claude Rawson's introduction, which is excellent and which you should read afterwards. The Penguin prints the Faulkner text with the Motte variants noted, if you care about that; if you don't care about that, you probably shouldn't be buying the Penguin.

One warning. Swift is a scatological writer and the eighteenth century's tolerance for bodily disgust is not ours. The urine, the excrement, the dwarf and the marrow bone — there is a great deal of it and it is not decoration. A student walked out of a seminar over it once, politely, and I didn't blame her.

Nine rather than ten, only because Book Three sags and because the frame, the letter from Captain Gulliver to his cousin Sympson added in 1735, is often printed in a position that gives the ending away before you start. Check where your edition puts it.