The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Once upon a time came a story so full of high adventure and true love that it became an instant classic and won the hearts of millions. Now in hardcover in America for the first time since 1973 (in its native Florin it has been on the Florinese Times bestseller list continuously since the week it was published), this special edition of The Princess Bride is a true keepsake for devoted fans as well as those lucky enough to discover it for the first time.

Westley ... handsome farm boy who risks death and much, much worse for the woman he loves; Inigo ... the Spanish swordsman who lives only to avenge his father's death; Fezzik ... the Turk, the gentlest giant ever to have uprooted a tree with his bare hands; Vizzini ... the evil Sicilian, with a mind so keen he's foiled by his own perfect logic; Prince Humperdinck ... the evil ruler of Guilder who has an equally insatiable thirst for war and the beauteous Buttercup; Count Rugen ... the evilest man of all, who thrives on the excruciating pain of others; Miracle Max ... the King's ex-Miracle Man, who can raise the dead (kind of); The Dread Pirate Roberts ... supreme looter and plunderer of the high seas; and, of course, Buttercup .... the princess bride, the most perfect, beautiful woman in the history of the world.

S. Morgenstern's timeless tale - discovered and wonderfully abridged by William Goldman - pits country against country, good against evil, love against hate. From the Cliffs of Insanity through the Fire Swamp and down into the Zoo of Death, this incredible journey and brilliant tale is peppered with strange beasties both monstrous and gentle, and memorable surprises both terrible and sublime.

Last week was the final week in the Princess Bride Readalong, and we came to the end of the journey. The final section was the additional chapter, or rather the first chapter of the long lost sequel to The Princess Bride, Buttercup's Baby.

After the somewhat wishy-washy ending to The Princess Bride, it is interesting that Goldman wrote Buttercup's Baby, but I am not sure that it added a lot to the Princess Bride experience. We saw two main points of view - Fezzik and Inigo. I wasn't all that keen on Fezzik's, but I loved Inigo's story! Could have read a lot more about Inigo! The strange thing about this one chapter is that the time frame seemed somewhat fluid as well. The parts about Fezzik took place after the end of  The Princess Bride, but all of Inigo's story took place before the events of the main book.

Once again, the author continued to interject into the text. Sometimes those interjections were very amusing, but at others, they were just plain annoying and not funny at all. A big part of this chapter was talking about Goldman being allowed to write this chapter, because the Morgenstern estate preferred to have a prominent Florinese author, Stephen King, to do the abridgement rather than have Goldman do it. This was one section of interjection that I did enjoy, with Goldman writing about going to visit King to talk about the fact that he really wanted to do the abridgement. I thought it was very cool of Stephen King to be part of this. Apparently he still gets asked about this because there is an answer about it on his Frequently Asked Questions page on his website.

Sometimes the interjections served to challenge the reader to disbelieve what they are reading

For example, towards the end there was a mention about golf balls, and there was the following interruption.

(Me again, last time this chapter: no, that is not anachronistic either; there were golf balls in Scotland seven hundred years ago, and, not only that remember Inigo had studied with MacPherson the Scot. As a matter of fact, everything Morgenstern wrote is historically accurate; read any decent book on Florinese history.)

Talking about the book as a whole, I did enjoy the read, but there is a big BUT, I never connected with Buttercup at all! All we really learnt about her was that she was beautiful, and that's about it. It wasn't enough for this reader.

This isn't the first readalong that I have participated in, but it is the first one I have actually completed (go me!). Generally I wouldn't spread a book this size over a period of five weeks, and so I sometimes found it difficult to either put the book down at the end of each section, and then to pick it back up again.

In the end, I though The Princess Bride was fun, but I think I need to now watch the movie to see exactly why this story is so beloved by so many people I know!

I am planning to watch the movie shortly and will hopefully post about it when I do.

Click on the following link to see my previous posts about The Princess Bride readalong

Rating 4/5

Sunday Salon: October Reading Reflections

I am pretty happy with my October reading! 16 books completed, some good reads, some were ebooks, and a couple were a bit outside my normal reading range. Wait until you see my post tomorrow of the books that I received during the month of October though. Despite a good reading month, my TBR got a lot bigger instead of smaller!

Here are my reads for October:

Lady of Hay by Barbara Erskine 3/5
The Exile by Diana Gabaldon and Hoang Nguyen 4.5/5
The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett 3/5
Adrien English Mysteries by Josh Lanyon 4/5
The Confessions of Catherine de Medici by CW Gortner 4.5/5
The Accidental Mistress by Tracy Anne Warren 4/5
Gobsmacked by L B Gregg 4/5
Shelter Mountain by Robyn Carr 4.5/5
Dark Road to Darjeeling by Deanna Raybourn 4.5/5
Maybe This Time by Jennifer Crusie 3.5/5
Ravishing in Red by Madeline Hunter 4/5
Seducing an Angel by Mary Balogh 3.5/5
The Princess Bride by William Goldman 4/5
The Sharing Knife: Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold 4.5/5
The Passionate Brood by Margaret Campbell Barnes 4.5/5
The Cinderella Deal by Jennifer Crusie 4.5/5



I thought I would mention a couple of things. Gosbmacked was a m/m romance, and the Adrien English Mysteries are erotic mysteries featuring gay bookseller/amateur detective Adrien English. It is actually the first two books in the series, and I have the next couple waiting here to be read.

The Exile is the graphic novel version of the first half or so of the Outlander novel by Diana Gabaldon. I liked it a lot, but I do think it is a book for the existing fans, not necessarily for new fans of the series.

I was so pleased that I finished reading The Princess Bride because I decided to read it as part of a readalong hosted by Chrisbookarama. I have done attempted a couple of readalongs before but I tend to get lost along the way. For example, the first book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy is still sitting by the side of my bed despite the fact that I started a readalong early this year.

The book that I read for the Year of the Historical was the excellent Confessions of Catherine de Medici by CW Gortner and this book also counts as my final read for the French Historical Challenge as well.

The two books by Pratchett counted for the Terry Pratchett challenge.

As at the end of October, I have read 88 books of the 100 that I was aiming for in the Support Your Local Library challenge, so it looks like I will make that target.

There are still a number of challenges that I am not making a lot of progress on, but that doesn't mean that I won't be starting to think about next years challenges soon.

Princess Bride Readalong - Milestone 4

I am not sure why, but as I sit down to write this post the song that has popped into my head and won't go away is My Way. I know it has been sung by numerous people over the years, but it is hard to go past Old Blues Eyes version, and that is the one that I have on a loop in my head!

Part of the reason for this is that Milestone 4 brings us to the end of the story of The Princess Bride itself. There is one more milestone, which is to read the first chapter of the long lost sequel to the book which is called Buttercup's Baby. Another reason is that it seems applicable to all of the characters and to the author too.

And what an ending, or more precisely, what a lack of an ending. To be honest I was a bit disappointed in some ways. The romantic in me wanted a happy ever after and to be honest, based on everything I had ever heard about the book/movie, that's what I expected. These days if we read the actual last line we would definitely apply the term cliffhanger to the ending! Either that or sequel bait, and yet it fits perfectly with the tone of the book, and I loved the idea of the father doing his own editing of the story as he reads the book to his young son, and that William Goldman believed for so long that was the ending, only realising as he came to do the abridgement that there was another ending.

There was a lot that happened in this part of the book! Fezzik and Inigo working as a team as they make their way through the tunnels that form the Zoo of Death, the dreadful treatment of Westley, a visit to Valerie and Miracle Max, the reunion, the wedding!

I thought that Valerie and Miracle Max were such delightful secondary characters! I loved the back and forth between them, and with the other characters:

"You see," Max explained as he pumped, "there's different kinds of dead: there's sort of dead, mostly dead and all dead."

And...

"Sonny, don't you tell me what's worth while - true love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. Everybody knows that."

I think it is the secondary characters like Max and Valerie that will be one of the standouts for me from the book. They didn't necessarily get a lot of page time, but these characters, and for example, the Queen, definitely left a big impression. Some of the bad guys were a bit cookie cutter bad guy for me, but I think that was rather the point.

I did like the use of a countdown technique to force the tension to rise for the reader as the reader hoped that Westley would get to the wedding in time, and still be alive enough.

And just because I alluded to it earlier in the post, here is Frank Sinatra singing My Way.

Princess Bride Readalong - Milestone 3

The Princess Bride readalong continues, and this week we were to read the sixth chapter of the book. As we are getting towards the end of the book, things should be coming towards the conclusion, and yet somewhat curiously, not a lot happened in this chapter. Things happened, but really there was a lot of repetitiveness and didn't really move things forward all that quickly.

What I did finish the chapter contemplating was how dark this chapter was. The author(s) use a very light language to describe very dark actions. We have murder plots, torture and deception amongst other things.

I was reminded that Goldman is not the only one to use this kind of tactic when it comes to these dark themes. Many of our nursery rhymes and children's songs have darker meanings than you would think if you didn't know about them.

For example, Ring a Ring O' Rosy is supposed to reference the Black Plague. It was commonly believed that sneezing was a sign that you were going to die, hence the all fall down (dead)

Ring a Ring O' Roses,
A pocketful of posies,
Atishoo! Atishoo!
We all fall down!

Mary, Mary Quite Contrary refers to either Mary, Queen of Scots or Queen Mary (Tudor) with silver bells and cockle shells referring to torture tools if it is Bloody Mary!

Mary, Mary quite contrary
How does your garden grow,
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row

I am sure that there are other nursery rhymes whose macabre beginnings have been lost over the years. Do you know of any?

Princess Bride Readalong: Rats

This week is the second week of the Princess Bride readalong being hosted by Chrisbookarama.

In my post last week, I mentioned that I was half expecting to find a character something like Reepicheep from the Narnia novels to come bounding into the storyline. It seems like I have been having a ratty kind of week, because not only did ROUS (Rodents of Unusual Size for the uninitiated) appear in the story (nothing like Reepicheep unfortunately) but I was also reading Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents which was chock full of walking, talking, thinking rats!

For everything that I heard about this book/movie before I started reading the book, the character I had heard the most quotes from, or the most about, was Inigo Montoya, and in the fifth chapter of the novel we get to meet Inigo, along with his co-horts, Fezzik and Vizzini. Each of them got to face off against the man in black who follows them up the Cliffs of Insanity. Who is that masked man?

For the trio of characters we get to meet in Chapter 5, we learn not only of their strengths, but also their motivations and how it was that they came to be sailing towards the Cliffs of Insanity trailed not only by the man in black but also by the flotilla of ships that Prince Humperdink has gathered together.

First we meet Inigo. For years now I have been hearing the name Inigo Montoya mentioned in relation to this book. I know that Mandy Patinkin played the role in the movie despite the fact that I hadn't read the book or seen the movie. We find out about Inigo and his sword making father, and we learn of Inigo's determination to become more than a sword fighter master - he is beyond that level. He is a wizard in swordsmanship, and he has worked to achieve that level in order to be able to take revenge against the six fingered man who killed his father.

Secondly we meet the giant Fezzik. Weighing 85 pounds as a one year old, and continuing to grow and develop his strength over many years, Fezzik's family quickly worked out how to use their son's size and strength to their own advantage by putting him into the prize fighting circuit. They travelled the world forcing their son to fight against much older and more experience fighters. Fezzik isn't necessarily the brightest spark, although he does love rhymes, and he is much more sensitive than you would normally give a prize fighting giant credit for!

And then there is Vizzini, the brains of the outfit. There is probably not much that I can say about Vizzini that he couldn't say much better himself:

There are no words to contain all my wisdom. I am so cunning, crafty and clever, so filled with deceit, guile and chicanery, such a knave, so shrewd, cagey as well as calculating, as diabolical as I am vulpine, as tricky as I am untrustworthy....well, I told you there were not words invented yet to explain how great my brain is, but let me put it this way: the world is several million years old and several billion people have at one time or another trod upon it but I, Vizzini the Sicilian, am, speaking with pure candor and modesty, the slickest, sleekest, sliest and wiliest fellow who has yet come down the pike. 

.

This fifth chapter was very long, even with the significant abridgements that Goldman was keen to stress that he had taken out. With the structure the way it was though there were short sections within the chapter where we learnt about the three characters, plus their action with the man in black, and then the final scenes where we find out who the man in black is and what he wants with Buttercup.

If there is one character who I am having a little trouble warming up to it is Buttercup. At this stage it seems that her main merit is her beauty, and I am definitely not impressed with the choices that she made at the end of this chapter. I am sure though that she will redeem herself in due course!

So far I am having a lot of fun with this readalong. The thought did cross my mind tonight that maybe I should buy the book, and what the heck, might as well buy the movie straight away too, as I am pretty sure I am going to love it when I do eventually watch it!

Teaser Tuesday: The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Today my post is both a **Teaser Tuesday post, and also my first post for the Princess Bride readalong being hosted by Chris from ChrisBookarama. Not only had I not read the book before, but I also hadn't seen the movie. I can't tell you the number of times that I have confessed that and had people look at me aghast and say you really must watch the movie.

Given that I generally prefer the book to the movie I thought I would start with the book and maybe move onto the movie.

My teaser is a little longer than the customary two sentences, but I just loved the whole paragraph. It comes from page 58:

There have been five great kisses since 1642 B.C, when Saul and Delilah Korn's inadvertent discovery swept across Western Civilization. (Before then couples hooked thumbs.) And the precise rating of kisses is a terribly difficult thing, often leading to great controversy, because although everyone agrees with the formula of affection times purity times intensity times duration, no one has ever been completely satisfied with how much weight each element should receive. But on any system, there are five that everyone agrees deserve full marks.

Well, this one left them all behind.

Originally when I saw the readalong I was interested in participating but had decided against it when I noticed that the title that my library had on their catalogue was "The  Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's classic tale of true love and high adventure: the "good parts"" my immediate reaction was that there was no way I was going to be reading an abridged version. It was only later when someone explained that it was the actual title of the book, not a description of its contents that I was then happy to borrow it and confirm my participation in the readalong.

The structure of this book is pretty unique. I certainly can't remember a book where an author has written a story about a novel that he recalled from his childhood but only shared the good bits, just like his dad did when he read it to him all those years before.

It is actually quite strange because in the introduction Goldman talks about the process of getting this book into print, and does use some of the facts from his life, but then, as Chris points out in her Milestone 1 post, a lot of the information in the introduction is made up. I can't remember the last time you couldn't be sure what was fact and what wasn't in an intro!

Once we get into the story itself I have been surprised at how quickly the novel moves through - courtesy of the abridgements that take all of the superfluous information out of the novel.

So far I think my favourite secondary character is Queen Bella. She is married to King Lotharon, a chronic mumbler, and it is fun to see her seemingly seeking direction from her husband and yet doing precisely what she pleases!

The only problem is that I keep on expecting someone like Reepacheep from the Chronicles of Narnia to appear on the page. I have no idea why I expect that to happen. Maybe I heard something from the movie, or something. There don't appear to be any other talking animals yet.

In terms of expectations, I am half expecting Westley to reappear. We'll see!

So far I am having a lot of fun reading it, and can see why so many people love it.  I have heard that the movie is different from the book, but I have every intention of finding out for myself at this stage.


**Teaser Tuesday is hosted by Miz B at Should Be Reading. Head on over to find out all about it, and how to join in!