Book review: "The Princess Bride" by William Goldman

Even though the book has been around for 35 years and the movie for 21 (and at one point I was watching the movie close to once a month), before these past few weeks I had never actually read The Princess Bride.  And now, looking back, I think the movie version is still my favorite.  Don't get me wrong, the book was good but I think the story just works better as a movie (it helped that William Goldman wrote both the book and the screenplay for the movie).

If you've seen the movie but never read the book (or vice versa), the two are very similar.  Since William Goldman wrote both, he knew what he could change in the book to still make the movie work - which is a lot better than having some stranger come in and write a horrible screenplay based on a good book.  In the movie we get little snippets of what the characters were doing before the story started but in the book you learn the whole story behind those snippets.  Take for instance Vizzini's comment in the movie to Fezzik about finding him living in Greenland.  In the book there's quite a few pages on how Fezzik got to Greenland but I kind of liked how random that comment was in the movie - that we had no idea why Fezzik was living in Greenland.

Another plus about having William Goldman write both the book and the screenplay was that when a passage in the book was also in the movie, I could picture that scene in my head (the Inigo-Westley duel for example) and get a better sense of what was going on.  Of course it also made me want to pull out the movie and watch it but that's to be expected.

So yes, I enjoyed the book and will probably read it again at some point - it made me laugh and at the end of Buttercup's Baby I even choked up a little bit - but I still like the movie more.