Indeed, Goldman professes to have had no idea there even were any boring parts until, with an absentee father's guilty conscience, he shipped his son, Jason, a copy of The Princess Bride as a 10th birthday present, only to be disappointed that the boy couldn't read past the first chapter. Goldman can't understand why Jason can't get hooked on the story as he did until he sits down to actually read the book for the first time:

"I skimmed the first chapter, and it was pretty much exactly as I remembered it. Then I turned to the second chapter, the one about Prince Humperdinck and the little kind of tantalizing description of the Zoo of Death. And that's when I began to realize the problem. Not that the description wasn't there. It was, and again pretty much as I remembered it. But before you got to it there were maybe sixty pages of text dealing with Prince Humperdinck's ancestry and how his family got control of Florin... The more I flipped on, the more I knew: Morgenstern wasn't writing any children's book; he was writing a kind of satiric history of his country and the decline of monarchy in Western civilization. But my father only read me the action stuff, the good parts."

Goldman contends that some critics (including Stephen King -- but more of that later) think he botched the job in places. In fact, I did an abridgement of my own in reading the story to my 8-year-old daughter, Sydnie, leaving out most of Goldman's digressive editorial interruptions which would have been lost on her (although I certainly enjoyed them). Sydnie, too, got hooked on the story, while much of the sarcasm flew past her (as, presumably, it was meant to). She also shared many of the same reactions attributed to the young Goldman as his own father read to him, in particular a spot when a main character dies (but, this being a fairy tale, it's an obstacle that has a work-around). So, in terms of telling a fast-paced story with a series of cliff-hangers (indeed, in one scene there is actual hanging from a cliff), a further abridgement of The Princess Bride succeeds almost too well: instead of going to sleep, your kid will be begging you to "please, please, pretty please with molasses on it," just read a little bit more.

Playing the role of the omniscient, know-it-all editor that many writers are plagued by, Goldman gets the urge to insert a reconciliation scene of his creation between Buttercup, the Princess Bride, and Westley, her lost love, to improve Morgenstern's narrative. Alas, Goldman complains he wasn't allowed to. (Don't drop everything and write for a copy of the reconciliation scene as Goldman suggests, by the way; what you'd get -- and it isn't quite what you might expect -- is included later in this edition.) One reason was Goldman's own editor, who "felt that if you abridge someone you can't suddenly start using your own words" (a comic comment on translation, which of course involves "using your own words" to make the original words understandable in another language). The other is a lengthy legal entanglement with the Morgenstern estate.

Indeed, according to Goldman, the impetus behind this particular edition is to prove to the estate's literary executors he's up to the task of abridging Morgenstern's sequel, Buttercup's Baby. Apparently the Morgenstern family prefers the aforementioned King to write the abridgement, who, needless to say, not only has wider name recognition, but a convenient surname to rewrite a fairy tale. Goldman wants desperately to do it, in part because he thinks his own storytelling art has dried up, and that this might be a way to rekindle his gift (another fairy tale motif and another ironic joke, considering that Goldman is already making this up.) It is King himself who suggests doing an anniversary edition to include Goldman's abridgement of the sequel's first chapter. See what the reaction is, get the pulse of the prospective audience, see if Goldman is truly up to the task.

Goldman presents a promising, if confusing, start. The confusion isn't his fault, he innocently claims, but Morgenstern's, who employs non-linear narrative techniques to write in a more "literary" fashion. As in the original, it seems as if another major character -- this time, Fezzick, the giant -- is doomed, though Goldman hints we can probably expect a last-minute miraculous reprieve of some sort.

I wouldn't recommend reading this part to your kid, though, if only because it leaves too may questions open, which of course is what would happen if you only have the first chapter of any good yarn. Let's hope that Goldman does intend to do the complete sequel rather than simply play a joke on the notions of sequels.

Finally, if you've seen the movie, read the book. But if you haven't read the book or seen the movie, read the book first. Except for the fact that it replaces the book's ambiguous ending with the more happy sort you'd expect in a mass entertainment movie, the cinema version is quite faithful to the abridgement (which isn't surprising since Goldman is the screenwriter). It also employs the neat conceit of Peter Falk reading the story to a bedridden boy, so it gives you a little bit of the flavour of what Goldman is getting at in his digressions about the child's visceral need for storytelling.

Yet, I don't think you can truly appreciate the movie without knowing the "full story" it refers to. My wife, for example, who hasn't read the book, thought the movie mildly diverting but couldn't understand what my daughter and I were getting so excited about in saying, "Hey, remember this part?" So, you might not "get" the fuss about The Princess Bride unless you read it first. Or, better yet, have it read to you.