Review: The Princess Bride

The Princess Bride by William Goldman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

When I find myself making conversation with a new acquaintance, one of my favorite gambits is "What's the last really good book you read?" The answer almost always leads to a really interesting conversation, because even if it's been years since someone read a good book, whatever comes to their mind is something that evokes strong opinions. It's a nice way to break the ice without prying, and people who can't come up with anything usually have any interesting explanation for why they haven't been reading much, or why they haven't been loving anything they've read, or why the can't think of anything even though they really enjoyed the hell out of the last few books they've read. Once the answer was unexpected, because I didn't know Endless Love was a book, and I hadn't heard of Scott Spencer, and I would never have expected a guy to pick anything with "love" in the title. I may have laughed in surprise at the time, which is bad of course, but I was a teenager speaking to someone really famous for the first time....anyway, my apologies to everyone on that.

Once the answer was "The Princess Bride," which was a film I really loved, and again, hadn't realized it was based on a novel, but I could imagine that it was awesome. Reader, it was not awesome. It was a lovely fantasy story broken up by the constant intrusion of the author and his (entirely fictional) framing story that was unpleasant and boring, and ugh. After I finished I put the book on the shelf and didn't touch it again except to put it in a box when I moved and then put it on a shelf. And then one day twenty-six years later my son mentions he'll be reading it for a class, and there it still was, dusty, but otherwise pristine.

And then after he read it we talked a bit and were largely in agreement, with the addition of "fat-shaming" to Goldman's sins. It left me thinking I should try reading it without reading all the framing bits to see what I thought. And it's a pretty good adventure/fantasy/comedy, really funny in some scenes (the scenes that are reproduced on screen verbatim).

I won't be reading more Goldman. In this book, the only two characters who aren't treated with disdain are the grandson and Stephen King. Everyone else is stupid or evil or hideous or shallow or vindictive, or some combination thereof. Now there's a possibility that Goldman the author deliberately created Goldman the character to be irascible for humorous effect. But there is also the possibility that Goldman the author may have just been horrible. And I'm pretty sure that reading anything else by him would clear up that little mystery for me. So I'm going to pass.

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