I love Lemony now! It just took a while for the plot, and better parody, to come through.
I changed my mind with #5. Pure, hilarious genius! The maliciously giggling Vice Principal Nero made me giggle MAO. You can see the social satire come through in #4 to #7 (which is as far as I’ve gotten so far). Plus you have to appreciate the protagonists and their inventive, athletic, intellectual heroics.
The author is clearly a genius of subtlety who gives exposition in little dribs and drabs at a time. I just wish it hadn’t taken three or four !@#$%^&* books to get good.
I stand by one thing I said before: these books only work as an absurdist parody.
I think the complexity of the books does increase as the series progresses. I’ve bought them all in the boxed sets of three, and it seems that each trilogy is more subtle and sophisticated than the last. And darker. Warning: #9 ends with a real cliffhanger! I can hardly wait for #10.
Hope you didn’t run too fast, because I misspoke myself. My mother got me 7, 8, and 9, and I forgot that they didn’t come in a box – she had to buy them seperately. Maybe there’s a box set available, but I don’t know.
I absolutely adore these books. I own them all, including The Unauthorized Autobiography of Lemony Snicket. The man is a genius. I especially like the two surviving Quagmire triplets, Duncan and Isadora. HAHAHAHAHA.
If you’re telling me what I think you are, then I am a bit disappointed already. I had assumed that Lemony Snicket was itself an anagram. For Montel Kinsey, or something.
Anyone know the time interval between books so far? My son and I started reading them as a fill-in between Potter books, but we quickly grew to love them, so we got started a bit late. We finished all nine in pretty short order, and are now anxious to read #10.
The Snickett books are already beloved by those of us who were brought up on fairy tales back in the 1930s (particularly those edited by Andrew Lang). My favorite was Lang’s “My Own Fairy Book” which contained three novels, two of which parodied many grim and gruesome fairy tales. I have the first nine Snickett books and am waiting for the other four promised by Snickett.
I gave the first eight books as gifts in Christmas 2001–a set each for two of my granddaughters (Katie, age 11, and Jennifer, age 10). They loved the books and read them just as voraciously as they read the first four Harry Potter books, Anne of Green Gables series, the Little House on the Prairie series, the Doctor Dolittle books, the Wizard of Oz books, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and on and on.
Anyone who is offended by Count Olaf’s presumptive nuptials with Violet may not be fully in touch with the wonder of young minds. The kids who read (and enjoy) these adventures–as well as the subtle and often not-so-subtle humor and the outrageous devices used by Snickett–know it is a spoof. These are the kind of books that kids read more than once, up into adulthood and beyond, because Snickett’s writing is at many levels. It is easy reading, not the scope of the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and it doesn’t have the religious undertones of C.S. Lewis’s Chranicles of Narnia, but I predict these books will become classics over the years and will be read by generations yet unborn.
Snickett has published two books (under the improbable name of Daniel Handler), “The Basic Eight” and “Watch Your Mouth,” both of which reflect a similar dark humor.
