The Princess Bride
The Princess Bride is a timeless tale that pits country against country, good against evil, love against hate. This incredible journey and artfully rendered love story is peppered with strange beasties monstrous and gentle, memorable surprises both terrible and sublime, and such unforgettable characters as... Westley, the handsome farm boy who risks death (and much worse) for the woman he loves; Inigo, the Spanish swordsman who lives only to avenge his father's death; Fezzik, the gentlest giant ever to have uprooted a tree with his bear hands; Vizzini, the evil Sicilian, with a mind so keen he's foiled by his own perfect logic; Prince Humperdinck, the eviler ruler of Guilder, who has an equally insatiable thirst for war and beauteous Buttercup; Count Rugen, the evilest man of all, who thrives on the excruciating pain of others; Miracle Max, the King's ex-Miracle Man, who can raise the dead (kind of); and, of course, Buttercup... the princess bride, the most perfect, beautiful woman in the history of the world!
Stats for nerds
12recommend
40mentions
37people
2008–2026years
33% recommend63% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Other books I know of that play with part or all of the text itself being an artifact of the fiction:
- The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brian. Fictional scholar of a fictional esoteric philosopher weaves his commentary on same philosopher into an account of his… journey.
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino. You(!) embark on an adventure to find the book you believed you purchased, which was If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.
- The Princess Bride, William Goldman. This has a very different framing narrative from the film, and is very much worth a read.
(Setting aside epistolary novels like Dracula)
- Wow! These two comments (parent and GP) tie together so many previously unrelated things in my life. (Like Beckett, read with a teacher that I also took a lot of Shakespeare plays from; read Joyce with the book group my bridge club spun off; got introduced to cricket via attending an IPL game in Chennai in '08; and loved Princess Bride both in high school and watching with my high school aged kids).
- While I'm no big fan - mostly the nostalgia effect - I used to work with someone who never watched Star Wars. I found it hard to imagine.
A few weeks ago I watched "A new hope" with my 13yo daughter, we both loved it. Of course the effects didn't age well, but the story and acting is as strong as it used to be. I'm going to watch "The empire strikes back" with her soon and have to be careful not to spoil the "I am your father" reveal. Though I admit she's not very typical - we're both Whovians ("number one fans", so to speak;-)), so she's accustomed to story, writing and acting being way more important than SFX (which is IMHO the correct attitude, at least most of the time).
I really hope that she'll find some fellow geeks soon.
Also, in my current team at work I used to be the only one who watched (and read) "The Princess Bride". Now one coworker also watched it, and one day we're going to watch it together with the whole team. I think many people nowadays know it only from memes, which is sad - it's a great movie.
- I've enjoyed these books during long drives and flights to Japan during the past decade.
The Dresden Files series, by Jim Butcher.
The Mistborn series, by Brandon Sanderson.
The Stormlight Chronicles, by Brandon Sanderson.
Choose Your Own Autobiography, by Neil Patrick Harris.
As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride, by Cary Elwes.
Compleated Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin, by Mark Skousen.
The Book of Mormon.
The Story of Civilization Series, by Will Durant.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.
Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.
Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux.
My Bondage and My Freedom, by Frederick Douglass.
- The Phantom Tollbooth
The Princess Bride (even better than the movie)
- 1. Okami. I've always been slightly frustrated by video games. Here we have the opportunity to create truly fantastical worlds with the only limits being what we can imagine and so much effort goes in to creating WW2 shooters or football games or whatever. When the first trailer was revealed for Okami at e3 in 2005, wow. That fake celestial language starts up, showing flowers blooming in the path of the sun god as she runs and then, at the press of a button, the whole screen turns into parchment and you paint on it with a celestial brush to instantiate your nature god powers. I almost cried. I tried not to get my hopes up too much because I thought there was no way for it to live up to my imagination. And then it did. Easily the greatest video game experience I have ever had. Windwaker and Hollowknight are close seconds.
2. Worm. Heavily hyped in my friend circles, I waited for it to finish. Not without its flaws but holy hell, ruined a lot of traditional fiction for me with its length, depth, and quality of ending.
3. As an adult reading the books that childhood movies were based on: The Princess Bride and The Neverending story were both incredibly satisfying books.
4. Therevada Buddhism. Many things in life focus on individual insights. Only a few focus on strengthening the machinery that generates insights. I write about it here: http://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2020/01/mistrans...
