My own self

Finally getting around to checking out the first couple of books of this series, it's about what I expected. Clever little jokes, a rather impressive control of the language, an amusingly present (fictional) author and relatively gripping but predictable plots. Also, as the author puts no small amount of effort into warning the reader about repeatedly, it's rather melancholy and sad.

Still, they're super-quick and easy reads, and while I do realise the target audience is far below my own age, I had fun reading these two books. The first book details the first experiences of the Baudelaire children Violet, Klaus and Sunny after their parents suddenly pass away in a brutal fire. They're sent off to live with a distant (but geographically close) relative, Count Olaf, who quickly turns out to be an evil man with designs on the orphans' great inherited fortune. In the end the children, using their natural gifts of inventing, reading and biting, outwit and defeat the Count, but as the author takes care in pointing out, do not get a happy ending anyway as the villain escapes. The second book follows the children into the care of a new guardian, this one benevolent and amusing, but with a thwarted Olaf furiously on their heels. More tragedies so ensue.

These two books, together with book number 3 as far as I gather, make up the basis for the movie with Jim Carrey, a movie which reading this turns out to have been pleasingly true to the books. Compared to the movie, the adults are a tiny bit less oblivious (though still very much so) and the children a tiny bit more so (though still far more clever than the adults). A main difference, though, is that the antagonist of Count Olaf is, while still very ominous and disgusting, less ridiculous and more intelligent than in the movie. Of course, this might be a result of the children not knowing him very well yet, after just two books, and it might change. Still, the man is genuinely creepy, and somewhat less clueless than the other adults of the tales.

The books have thirteen chapters, and there are thirteen books to the series - hardly a coincidence - and I'm told they keep following the children being sent to a new guardian-formula for a while, gradually starting to spice it up a little more. I'm sure they'll be more enticing once I'm done with the third book and venture into unknown territory, the first three being so close to the movie that I basically know what will happen next in almost every scene. There are also subtle hints to a larger, over-arching plot line in these first two books, and I expect that to become increasingly central to later books in the series.

Good books, really, with the humour making up for the melancholia and the easy, quick read making up for the somewhat predictable plot. I'm sure to keep reading at these and see how it all turns out.

Horribly horribly, no doubt.