Thank A Writer Post: Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler

This is the third of five posts in a series of thank-you notes to writers. The project was started by Maggie Mason of Go Mighty and Nathan Bransford.
 

Dear Lemony Snicket,

Thank you for helping my daughter to love reading.

Or should I thank you? Loving to read is a blessing and a curse, to me. People who don't read seem to be much more productive. If I didn't read, though, I suspect I'd have much less to think about. As Aloïse Buckely Heath opined, we readers like to think we have more inner resources, but we're probably compensating for having fewer of them.

But I digress. It was the sixth book in The Series of Unfortunate Events, The Ersatz Elevator, that did the trick. "Did the trick" here means, "let my daughter in for a lifetime of reading and re-reading, making allusions no one else gets, and becoming emotionally entangled with imaginary people." She must have read five Lemony Snicket books before she got to that point, in addition to a number of painfully-completed Bob books, Magic Tree House books, and the like. She really didn't see the point, though, until she lived the events at 667 Dark Avenue along with Violet, Klaus and Sunny, including but not limited to:

• Esmé Squalor's obsessive need to be fashionable, not unlike some people one meets in real life.
• Jerome Squalor's cowardly failure to save the Baudelaires, Jerome who up until that point had been so "nice."
• Esmé's throwing the orphans down an elevator shaft, and the two completely black pages that follow.

And then she never looked back.

P.S. We have a cat named Klaus.
P.P.S. I loved Why We Broke Up, too.