Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

Why yes, I DID just finish reading Cary Elwes’s memoir about filming “The Princess Bride.”  How did you guess?

Seriously, though, I’ve been looking forward to reading this one for months…along with half the population of the Salt Lake Valley.  It took forever for it to come in at the library the first time around, and then when I didn’t get to it in three weeks, back it had to go.  (Books are only renewable if there are no holds–or enough available copies to fill the holds.)  In fact, it may have gone back more than once, but I always got it back eventually, and it finally moved up to the top of my ‘what to read next’ list.  And oh, I enjoyed it!  If I’m going to be completely honest, the writing itself wasn’t always my favorite–there’s conversational, and then there’s too many blasted sentence fragments–but ultimately, it didn’t really matter.  Cary Elwes sounds like a lovely person (the phrase ‘thoroughly pleasant, likable chap’ keeps coming to mind), and he obviously loved everyone with whom he worked on “The Princess Bride.”  The behind-the-scenes stories are often hilarious, and the book is peppered with comments by his fellow cast members, Rob Reiner, and a few others involved with the movie.  If you love “The Princess Bride”–if you can remember watching it and quoting it more times than you may admit to now–then you really need to read this one.  It’s a thoroughly enjoyable jaunt down Memory Lane.