What I'm Reading: Un Mal Principio

“But even if they could go home it would be difficult for me to tell you what the moral of the story is. In some stories, it’s easy. The moral of “The Three Bears,” for instance, is “Never break into someone else’s house.” The moral of “Snow White” is “Never eat apples.” The moral of World War One is “Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.” […] and as the Baudelaire orphans sat and watched the dock fill with people as the business of the day began, they figured out something that was very important to them. It dawned on them that unlike Aunt Josephine, who had lived up in that house, sad and alone, the three children had one another for comfort and support over the course of their miserable lives. And while this did not make them feel entirely safe, or entirely happy, it made them feel appreciative.” ― Lemony Snicket, The Wide Window

I once wrote a blogpost for one of my grad classes entitled "Everything I Know I Learned from the Bauldelaires" and the remainder of this post is the content of that post...

That was an excerpt from the children’s book series “A Series of Unfortunate Events.” There are so many reasons why I love this series and often return to it. First, it’s funny. Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler) is a master of irony, satire, and outright humor. When you read them as a child you only grasp some of the jokes, but if you read the books as you get older you see more and more of the humor. It’s never the same experience when you re-read them. That's why I'm currently reading the series in Spanish and re-discovering it all over again (while rediscovering my Spanish).

Aside from its wit, I learned much of my present day vocabulary from this series. Snicket uses impossibly big words throughout his books and defines them in the funniest ways. Always beginning with "a word which here means..." I guess that’s why they’ve stuck with me for so long. I knew the meaning of penultimate, eratz, and aberrant before many of my peers. Maybe I'll use these books to help my future students learn words in context. Hopefully, the same will go for the Spanish vocab.

Besides the content of the books, which is indescribably clever, the books hold a special meaning for me. I’ve always loved to read and spent inordinate amounts of time at the public library as a child. The first book I ever purchased for myself was “A Bad Beginning” (first in the series) from the Scholastic book fair in elementary school. There’s a sense of pride in purchasing and owning your first book. It was all mine, unlike our home library, which I shared with my siblings. I went on to buy the rest of the series as it was released and loved it more and more. It was also the first (non-picture) book I shared with my baby brother to encourage a love of reading in him. We still find ourselves in discussions referencing the jokes or scenes from the books.

Finally, there’s something a little refreshing to read a series about 3 orphan children, to whom everything imaginable happens, when you’re as young as I was. It always helps you put your own problems in perspective and still does. Or in the words of Snicket, “At times the world may seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe that there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough. And what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey.”

#nerd #book #youngadult