Random ‘interesting’ fact, though I’ve already told a few readers of Grind this, though Jhael doesn’t yet know, and I believe she’ll be extremely interested.

I’m reading a book by William Goldman; The Princess Bride.  He also wrote the script for the movie.

He is not the original author.  A fellow by the name of S. Morgenstern wrote it.

Imagine the movie where the uncle is reading the book to the sick child.  Now replace the uncle with a father, and make the sick child William Goldman, and you now know how he ‘read’ the book.

For years the book was read to him by his father, he loved it, it was read twice over to him while he was sick in bed.  In the later years he got his father to read out random parts to him.

He loved it, and it wasn’t until he had a child of his own that he actually picked up the book and read it.  His boy was ten, he gave the book to him for his birthday, and the kid didn’t like it!

I was outraged too!

So Goldman picked up his old copy of the book, worn and creased by his fathers hands.  He read it… and his son was right, the book wasn’t very good.

What the…?  Sacrilege!

Let me quote from the prologue;

“I skimmed the first chapter, and it was pretty much exactly as I remembered.  Then I turned to the second chapter, the one about Prince Humperdinck and the little kind of tantalising description of the Zoo of Death.

And that’s when I began to realise the problem.

Not that the description wasn’t there.  It was, and again pretty much as I remembered it.  But before you got to it, there were maybe sixty pages of text dealing with Prince Humperdinck’s ancestry and how his family got control of Florin and this wedding and that child begetting this one over here who then married somebody else, and then I skipped to the third chapter, The Courtship, and that was all about the history of Guilder and how that country reached its place in the world.  The more I flipped on, the more I knew: Morgenstern wasn’t writing any children’s book; he was writing a kind of satiric history of his country and the decline of his country and the decline of the monarchy of Western civilisation.

But my father only read me the action stuff, the good parts.  He never bothered with the serious side at all.”

The original book is titled;

THE PRINCESS BRIDE
S. Morgenstern’s
Classic Tale of True Love
and High Adventure

The book I’m now reading is;

THE PRINCESS BRIDE
S. Morgenstern’s
Classic Tale of True Love
and High Adventure

The “Good Parts” version Abridged by
William Goldman

… if it’s like the movie; it’s bloody good.  A true classic.

@_; ^{– The idiot didn’t post this for half an hour because he got caught up in the first chapter.  He only stopped at the first kiss.  The soppy bastard.}