Book Series: A Series of Unfortunate Events

 I can name most of the books and series I read as a child and teenager, but there are two I never revisited.

One is Percy Jackson because I oddly could not find copies of them virtually.

The other is A Series of Unfortunate Events, simply because I had forgotten about it, like most people, until I was reminded there was a show. And then it hit me like a sack of bricks, how deeply obsessed I was with a story where bad things happen to children.

It's interesting how there's like no cultural remembrance of this series and attempted franchise. It's like "Avatar" of books, and I like Avatar.

The writing style is long and meandering and wry, something I appreciated as a kid but appreciate slightly less as an adult, although there are still jokes to be found. I found myself highlighting a lot of the diatribes and being impressed at how essentially, the author wrote himself as a character in the background to the main story, which follows three orphans avoiding a bad guy (Who gets less evil and more cartoonishly evil, but still a thread) across 13 books.

I do think the overarching story and mystery that only truly starts in book 5 was basically Snicket - Daniel Handler  - fucking around and trying to confuse people and appear bigger than what it is, and wish it felt more complete. Outside of that, the only book I found with an unexpected twist that wasn't appropriately foreshadowed was The Grim Grotto.

The message intended for kids are "adults are incompetent, don't worry about it", and while they are, reading it as an adult I get "the good adults are either stuck in their ways, stupid, powerless," and the bad adults are foolish, but they aren't stupid. It's very "you have to continually look at your views and not get comfortable at the injustice you see in the world, and when you do so, you have to be brave enough to do something about it."