The Princess Bride

I'm going to start off by saying that The Princess Bride is probably my favorite movie of all time, which led to me having extremely high expectations for his book. Goldman wrote both this book, and the screenplay for the movie, so I thought that was an acceptable expectation. Right? Wrong!

In one of his additional anecdotes he placed throughout the book, he said “For those of you who have not yet thrown this book across the room in frustration...” and that spoke to me on a very deep level. The story is great! It makes for a great movie, and I will maybe just keep watching the movie and never read this book again.

The added parentheticals made it really hard to read in places - “‘I'll leave the lad an acre in my will,' Buttercup's father was fond of saying. (They had acres then.)”

The parentheticals, trying to figure out the whole Morgenstern vs. Goldman situation in the introduction, and the huge italicized sections saying what Goldman cut out of the Morgenstern book (which doesn't actually exist) probably would have driven me to put the book down and never pick it back up, if I hadn't loved the movie so much.

I did really enjoy that each character was given an extensive backstory. You get insight on why Inigo wants to kill the six-fingered man, and learn that he had a life before he was a drunk that Vizzini recruited.