This past Christmas, one of my great friends, Sam, gifted me this poster which I hung in my classroom.
Its title is 100 Epic Reads of a Lifetime, and there is everything from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Hunger Games to The Odyssey and Don Quixote. As you read (or have read in the past) the books, you scratch them off. Upon receiving the gift, I was able to scratch off 30 of the 100 books. My co-teacher, Amy, was shocked by all the “classics” I hadn’t read, but then I had to remind her of my extremely legalistic and sheltered upbringing, and the fact that I was not allowed (even in advanced English classes) to read anything with cussing, sex, or too much violence. In fact, I vividly remember having to go through a novel with a black sharpie and cross out words deemed inappropriate by our administration. I wish I could remember which novel it was. I’m thinking it was To Kill a Mockingbird, but I can’t remember for sure.
A few days after I put up the poster The Princess Bride appeared on my desk with the command, “You HAVE to read this” from Amy. Since I had finished all the Truman nominees, and really wanted a break from YA for a while, I obliged.
I don’t know if you have ever read this book, but I was so confused for the first part. As most people probably are, I am very familiar with the movie version, but it definitely doesn’t start out with Buttercup and Wesley. Instead, it starts with the author and his backstory for why he wanted to do this abridged version of the original.
Knowing nothing of the book or the author, I was believing everything in the introduction. It wasn’t until about two weeks later that I finally asked Amy, “What is up with this book?” Throughout the entire book, the author will add side comments, and I just felt that it was really weird.
Amy let me in on the (not so) secret. All the backstory, the additions, the reasons for deleting passages, are all fake. There was no original book, and this wasn’t an abridgment. Knowing this made the rest of the read so much better and so much funnier.
I will say that after reading nothing but YA fiction for the last seven months (ever since grad school ended and I put up the textbooks) this was a difficult book for me to get through. It was wordy and there was a lot of detail and description that you don’t get much of in YA books.
If you love the movie, you will probably love the book as well. I felt like it followed movie well which makes perfect sense since the author wrote the screenplay. I definitely recommend this book. It was funny and kept my attention; it just took a while for me to finish.
Michelle Reads & Writes 