We haven't been reading at night lately, so I wanted to start up again. This time, I'm sharing The Princess Bride with Shane. I love the book and it happened to be made into a terrific movie, as well (Which Carrie adores).
This edition included pictures!
The exposition in the beginning didn't go well. For one, it was longer than I remembered. Carrie tried to read a little one night and had no success either. If you haven't read the tale, there's a lot of satire involved where the author is rereading The Princess Bride himself and tongue-in-cheek realizing his father cut out a lot of boring description, lineages, and even whole chapters.
I skipped to Buttercup and Westley saying, "Goodbye," and it went better from there. I read most everything, but if scenes start to drag or I sense Shane's attention waning I know how to paraphrase or ask guided questions to keep him into it.
Carrie was out driving, so the TV remained off tonight. I asked Shane to grab the book, so we could sit on the couch with it. We read about the kidnapping and the climb up the Cliffs of Insanity. Good times!
Bonus story: My own experience with The Princess Bride was in 9th grade with Mr. Greek. I was in an advanced English class and we were plowing through stories I loathed (like Antigone and A Tale of Two Cities). I was bored and picked up a copy of The Princess Bride from the class set for the regular English 9 class. I read it in a day and brought it back, "Why couldn't we read this!?!?!" Mr Greek may have been slightly annoyed because he knew I'd been slacking in class and then I read the book I wasn't assigned in a day.
Bonus-bonus story: We also read Ender's Game in that class. I didn't pick up the book until I started to wake up and listen in on the class discussion of battle school. I picked up the book and actually started to read it for the first time, and, again, I got so engrossed I finished it in a day. Mr. Greek was annoyed yet again.
Bonus-bonus-bonus story: I actually liked Mr Greek even if he sometimes chose terrible stories. Several of my friends and I used to hang out in his classroom before the day started and played cards and talked. I got at least two good ones out of his class. I read the next two books after Ender's Game (Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide) afterwards. I'm not sure if Mr. Greek was more annoyed or more amused that I usually had a different book in class every several days and they were rarely something he assigned. He retired after John and I's year, so maybe we drove him batty.
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