Book Nerd’s Comments (group member since Dec 20, 2018)

Book Nerd’s comments from the Never too Late to Read Classics group.

I finally watched the movie. It was very eighties, which is a good thing. I enjoyed it but I still think I enjoyed the book more. I guess just because I read it first. I did remember the poison scene when I read it so I probably saw it before but I'm getting senile.

The Princess Bride by William Goldman


364 pages

Total to date: 401,729

Welcome PlotTwist. I haven't read near enough Dickens yet.

I'm definitely looking forward to the movie when I finish the book.

This is a fun read so far. It's very funny. And a quick read. I haven't had a lot of time to read but you could probably read it in a couple of days.

I do think going into all of the villain's backstories is a little distracting from the main story.

Mike wrote: "The Princess Bride is one of the most quotable movies I've ever seen. “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” The narrative structure of the movie has a grandfather reading the good bits to his bed ridden grandson but I hadn't realised the film was actually based on a book. I'll have to join this read!"
Great to have you.

The author claims to be writing "the good parts" from a fictional book. That's an interesting narrative structure.

What happens when the most beautiful girl in the world marries the handsomest prince of all time and he turns out to be...well...a lot less than the man of her dreams?

As a boy, William Goldman claims, he loved to hear his father read the S. Morgenstern classic, The Princess Bride. But as a grown-up he discovered that the boring parts were left out of good old Dad's recitation, and only the "good parts" reached his ears.

Now Goldman does Dad one better. He's reconstructed the "Good Parts Version" to delight wise kids and wide-eyed grownups everywhere.

What's it about? Fencing. Fighting. True Love. Strong Hate. Harsh Revenge. A Few Giants. Lots of Bad Men. Lots of Good Men. Five or Six Beautiful Women. Beasties Monstrous and Gentle. Some Swell Escapes and Captures. Death, Lies, Truth, Miracles, and a Little Sex.


Our read for September is the brand new classic The Princess Bride.
Probably better known from the 1987 movie. I'm sure I've seen the movie at some point but I don't remember anything about it, so it will be good to read the book first.

Mirkwood sounds like a nice place to hike and camp.

Pam wrote: "Book Nerd wrote: "Ficciones is definitely living up to my expectations ..."

I am so glad to hear that Book Nerd! I keep picking up the book at night and can't get into any of the stories past 1 pa..."

They definitely require concentration but the stories are so short they aren't that hard.
They aren't all winners to me. They often refer to a lot of people Borges knew that I've never heard of and don't want to bother to look up but looking up the story on wikipedia helps me to understand some things.
I don't really bother with star ratings because it's hard to quantify what I think of things.

Welcome Mark.

Welcome, Rory.

There are definitely similarities to Harry Potter and other stuff like Discworld. I've only read one Discworld book so far but still.

My copy had the illustrations too. They're really good.

The Lottery in Babylon - reminded me of The Trial by Kafka where an underground government organization expands to an insane amount of power.

The Library of Babel - the idea of trying to quantify everything in a certain way to contain all information.

Ficciones is definitely living up to my expectations.

Well that was whacky. It kind of reminded me of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Storied from Ficciones:

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - was really mindbending. About the way memes and ideas change our perception of reality.

Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote - This seemed weird and pointless. I think the whole story demonstrates the line "There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless."

My internet's fixed now, thanks.

Yeah, it seems pretty weird and random. I'm a little over a hundred pages in.

Looks fun. I haven't read that yet and didn't get what the title meant at firdt.

I finished A Universal History of Iniquity. It was a nice little book of crime stories but I'm looking forward to starting Ficciones.

Samantha wrote: "Book Nerd wrote: "This looks great but it's SO long!"

As I often tell children at the library when they see a long book that they're interested in reading: every book is read the same way - 1 page..."
Yeah, one page at a time. For a looong time. Hopefully I can read it some day.