Snicket, Lemony: (01) The Bad Beginning

I went to the library today looking for audio books, and read Lemony Snicket’s The Bad Beginning as a result.

This makes sense, really.

I have a five-hour drive ahead of me on Sunday. Since I don’t have a car, I’m not used to driving long distances by myself; accordingly, it seemed like a good idea to get a book on tape to keep my brain occupied (football season being over; football games work surprisingly well for this). The problem I had, though, is that I didn’t want it to be longer than this trip (because I can’t listen to them when I’m just sitting still, and I probably wouldn’t want to wait until the next time I drove to finish it, being impatient); but I hate abridgments; and I didn’t want to get something that might end up harming my mental image of a character’s voice. (They had a few Brother Cadfaels, but if the reader was terrible, I would find it hard to shake, and I still have ten of those left to read.)

They did have a copy of the second book in “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” which I had been meaning to check out at some point. (These are quite popular, so I shan’t bore my readers with a description; if you aren’t familiar with them, the author’s web site gives a good sense of what the series is like; and despite being in a huge, badly formatted pdf, the questions in the reader’s guide are pretty funny.) Beside, the audio book is read by Tim Curry; how could I resist? (I have to say, though, that while describing Curry as playing the “title role in Stephen King’s miniseries It” is accurate in one sense, that’s not really how I would put it . . . ) However, it didn’t seem like a good idea to start with the second book, and besides, what if I hated the writing? So I borrowed the first one, as well. (I also borrowed the BBC’s adaptation of The Hobbit as a backup.)

This took me about five minutes to read. It was an amusing five minutes, but all hail libraries, because there is no way I would ever pay $10 for that. (The paperback from the library, $2.95, says “only available for distribution through the school market.” Feh.) As popcorn of the fluffiest sort, it was pretty good, and I’ll listen to the second on Sunday. I do have to say, however, that the legal twist at the end was about two orders of magnitude worse than Law and Order‘s attempts at being “provocative,” and that’s taking into account the general level of (non-)seriousness in the book. Not that I expect other people to be bothered by this.

There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different. For instance, people who hate stories in which terrible things happen to small children should put this book down immediately. But one type of book that practically no one likes to read is a book about the law. Books about the law are notorious for being very long, very dull, and very difficult to read. This is one reason many lawyers make heaps of money. [*] The money is an incentive—the word “incentive” here means “an offered reward to persuade you to do something you don’t want to do”—to read long, dull, and difficult books.

The Baudelaire children had a slightly different incentive for reading these books, of course. Their incentive was not heaps of money, but preventing Count Olaf from doing something horrible to them in order to get heaps of money. But even with this incentive, getting through the law books in Justice Strauss’s private library was a very, very, very hard task.

[*] Alas, I probably won’t be one of them.