Red Scare is a podcast hosted by @annakhachiyan and @nobody_stop_me Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere "But it is the most (inaudible)y god damned board you could ever imagine." cross to comply, still in control, understand a hand, a hand moved me, just like a station on the radio
Idk if it's emberassing but when I'm really going through some shit and want to feel grounded again I pick up one of the books. The Grim Grotto and the Hostile Hospital are my favorites that ironically bring me back to a certain happy place. That series shaped so much of my personality and attitude and taught me how to cope with my fucked up life with dry and dark humor as kid. It also influenced my writing style in school and learn how to creatively break typical structure and interest in more challenging literature at a young age (im not that smart anymore but it was pretty cool for a kid). Harry Potter kids were always the optimistic kids with stable homes, us Series of Unfortunate Events kids were all the ones who grew up too fast and were tired old souls already by the 3rd grade
rip aunt josephine you would’ve loved uber eats
lmaooo
I swear these were harry potter levels of popular for like 2 years then just disappeared
It was never Harry potter levels but they were huge.
I feel RS is more a series of unfortunate events as opposed to Harry Potter
Comment deleted by user
Disagree. They did a good job of capturing the Gothic atmosphere of the books, and Jim Carrey was great as Count Olaf.
I always hear that, but I think it actually did a pretty good job. Obviously had to trim a lot of stuff to make 3 books into one movie, but I think overall it's a fun watch.
Movie was too late imo
I heard the Netflix show was good
The Netflix show is better, but it compromises a lot on the tone of the books to make it work as a serialised Netflix drama for families.
I was so in love with Violet Baudelaire when I used to read these books. Really informed my sense of humor and liked the weird nonsense of the world.
lol for a minute there I used to copy the thing she did where she ties her hair up in a ribbon when she had an idea cause I wanted to be her
you should do that still
Reading this comment made me feel like a 13 year old with a crush again
i think the first crush i ever had was Emily Browning from the movie
She might've catalyzed my lifelong obsession of girls with blunt bangs
I am now realizing that my romantic interests have largely been Violet-esque.
The bookcover artwork mesmerised me
The ragged page edges are a core memory for me
These books sparked my obsession with codes and secret organizations and orphans
Wow suddenly a lot of things make sense to me
May I suggest the podcast Licenced to Chill
I liked the paper they used for them a lot. They cut them a really pleasing way as well
The whole book was a pleasant sensory experience. Smooth cover, embossed spine, detailed artwork. I remember spending a LOT of time with these books after the initial read-through.
Haha I know exactly what you mean. Surprised at how much I remember about them.
they deckled em
wow I had completely forgotten about that until you said this. yeah that was a pretty cool detail.
although it was very unsatisfying when you got bored and tried to use your thumb to flip through all the pages at once as a fidget, like you can do with normal books lol
children need to be exposed to the Absurd in fiction
CAKE SNIFFING ORPHAN
carmelita spats would post here
so would Esme Squalor
and i would welcome her contributions to what's "in" and "out"
oh we'd all be drinking aqueous martinis
A real vocab builder for kids
Real shit. Had me pullin' out the big-ass Webster to find out what the hell the word ersatz meant.
Taught me ‘penultimate’ rip
I remember reading these in elementary school with a dictionary next to me lmao
But he always helpfully gave a quirky little definition for the really tough words too. Vocab king.
"A word which here means" used to rip me up
I was 10 when I read these and I distinctly remember having to stop midway through the third book because it made me so sad
I watched the Netflix series and found myself getting distraught during the adaptation of the second book because I could see how happy the kids were with Monty and I knew what was gonna happen to him.
Comment deleted by user
its heavily implied they all died lol
I think the kids escaped the island and was left open ended but Olaf and everyone else left died
What happened
I think it happens towards the end not the middle but Aunt Josephine gets eaten by leeches. It was brutal for a kids book
I didn't go past the 6th book or so, and I think the later books included more of an overarching plot, but all the early books except for the first have a rough outline of:
After the events of the last book, the orphans are being taken to an increasingly distant relative who is incredibly strange in some way or ways. However, over the course of the books the children learn to adapt to that relative's strangeness and find the good in that person, or at least the situation, while at the same time Count Olaf (the first relative they were placed with and series villain) has infiltrated that family member's life in a thinly veiled disguise that the children see through and no one else does. Then the relative is murdered by Count Olaf and find that Olaf has somehow forged documents or otherwise abused the legal system to get the person he's disguised as to be the children's new guardian, which the children then have to figure out a way to overturn.
These were the best ones, I didn't give a shit about VFD or any of that and I don't remember it getting solved in a meaningful way
I think the third book has a fire
I went to a Barnes and noble for a release party for the last book and everyone thought I was cosplaying as Klaus but I just kind of looked like him
Lot of guys on here Klaus-maxxing
holy shit if this isnt one of the most accurate descriptions of a male rs user I've ever heard lol
The kid in the movie was cute bit they really were like "f how this character is supposed to look based on all the covers and illustrations " lol but points to how much he and Emily browning looked alike/like siblings
Comment deleted by user
Yeah I’m pretty sure I had all of these at one point. Was going through boxes in my parents basement recently and found one of them. My mom is a librarian so we didn’t buy books all that much and when we did they’d be donated pretty quickly. Which I think is probably better than boxing them up only to find them 15 years later and have nice nostalgia trip.
I really wanna go back and read them again. When I was a kid I would take them out at the library but i didn’t read them in order because they didn’t always have the next one so i didn’t get a fully coherent story lol
My middle school had this thing where we would send letters to our favorite figures (authors, actors, sports players) and ask them for a piece of trash and then we'd all exhibit them at the end and the whole town would come see the trash exhibit. I wrote to Lemony and didn't receive any trash but instead a letter that had randomly capitalized words that when put in order spelled out "I am Count Olaf."
When I was a little kid I thought Lemony Snicket and Jiminy Cricket were the same person
When I was a kid, he (Snicket/Handler) came to my elementary school classroom and read one of the books to us for like an hour this one time.
But the whole time he was there, he kept apologizing to us that Lemony Snicket couldn’t make it that day, and that his name was Daniel, and Lemony had a family emergency and asked him to fill in reading for him that day, and to tell us all he was very sorry for not making it.
Played it completely deadpan, never actually explained the joke, and it went over all of our heads bc we had no idea who this “Daniel Handler” guy was. All us kids were unironically like “man fuck this Lemony Snicket guy for bailing on us!” 😡
In hindsight, pretty hilarious commitment to the bit. What a weirdo. Respect lmao
What a fucking legend. He knew that you'd appreciate it years later
When I was a kid I thought Ripleys Believe it or Not was made by Ridley Scott
I just love that he was in The Magnetic Fields
I discovered the Magnetic Fields because of the audiobooks. They made original songs for all of them, which rock.
He even wrote + played on 69LS
This is really cute, watching an RS community genuinely like something that's meant for children. Today your hearts grew 3 sizes, apparently
It was a rare success at something to challenge Harry Potter ,that wasn't YA brain rot shite , and that an actual dark tone and defined setting. Reading Harry Potter as an adult made it stand out to me just how uninteresting the writing is, even as a child Rowling's use of adverbs pissed n riff all over the place.
I loved these when I was a kid. I think I grew out of them though and never finished the last ones. Maybe got up to book 8? They were great though, I felt like I was reading something "adult" it was really cool as a kid not to be spoken down to or condescended.
Not really aware of the YA world but I gather it's pretty terrible from what people say. Has nothing like this been written since? They has a genuine despair to some of them, a hopelessness that set the readers up for the world more than things like Harry Potter which had a very clear good versus evil and super powerful chosen one protagonist. I think the popularity of HP is honestly why a lot of Millennials are infantilized.
It was a ruthless winner-take-all mad dash to be the first one to finish all 13 of these in 5th grade lol
“I’m gonna know the secrets before everyone else!” Then you finish the series and it’s like, well, not quite lol.
At some point it became less about enjoying the books and more about bragging rights for mogging your classmates on reading speed
Lmao 100%. Artemis Fowl was another big one at my school. I remember they had that message written in the fairy language at the bottom of the page. The best among us were able to decipher it, the rest wanted to be us.
Wonder what causes all this type of stuff to take a nosedive once you hit middle school? Like reading was cool in elementary school but once I hit 5th grade it all changed. Perhaps because in my school district the elementary schools were specific to the town you lived in while Middle/High school was fed by students from three smaller schools. The attitude didn’t change again until I started taking AP Classes in HS.
Idk, this post just got me thinking about that.
For me it was The Cherub and Alex Rider books
something something phlegm pot
It's interesting how many people seem to share the experience of racing to finish them. I remember not liking the first book but when I found out my friend had made it to book 6, I spent all my free time reading the rest of the series in an attempt to pass him. In the end I think he beat me by a few days. I started to get into the story a little more as I raced through the series but I don't think I ever really enjoyed the books.
The book where they lived with Esme Squalor, who lived her entire life based on what was "in" and what was "out", remains my favorite
(of course I read it when I was in 6th grade and had to wait until high school to get the reference)
I really wish he would've continued a series of unfortunate events with another series after book thirteen ended.
like it ended so abruptly is was basically like "there is so much you don't know, will probably never know, well bye". Violet, Klaus and Sunny could grow up and have kids of their own who discover more about V.F.D.
And none of this later books after SoUE are as good, tbh
I feel like this is bait because there’siterally a prequel-series called “all the wrong questions.” It’s pretty different but still enjoyable!
Comment deleted by user
I think you hit the nail on the head 👌
there's bread and cheese upon the shelf etc etc
It would have been nice to have more in the series, but I remember enjoying the ending. I liked the way Olaf died, his love for Beatrice, and the way the story left what the Bauldelaire orphans would do after leaving the island as kind of open-ended. I could be misremembering some details, though.
Have you read his prequel series, All the Wrong Questions?
I thought that Netflix series preserved the Pseudo-Victorian aesthetic very well even injecting some pretty good humor into it. But the dark, bleak sense of desperation was lost in translation. On some real shit tho, those books really increased my vocabulary as a young child, and I'm not sure I would have been such a fervent reader without them.
Very Fine Declaration. Vastly Fascinating, Delightfully Vivid, Finely Described.
Used to love these books as a kid
Whether you're a Potterhead or a Snicketfreak, at least we can all agree that children's books are the only literature printed since 2000 with a broad enough readership to sustain any meaningful conversation about them.
Lmao
No we can't
name one and please don't say Moshfegh
Idk but I read The Da Vinci Code in the fifth grade for a book report (couldn't understand half of it) because every adult was so obsessed with it and I wanted to be a smartass kid
Hated the magicbaiting in that
these are so funny and brilliant and as a big children's lit fan i kind of get sad when i read them because i'll never write something so cool
Looking back it's crazy how many references to highbrow stuff Snicket sneaked in.
Just from top of my head, its thanks to these books I first found out about Pynchon, Beckett, Buzzati, Bulgakov, Camus, Flaubert and of course Baudelaire.
Yes! He seemsmlessly sneaks in references to so much brilliant work and as a kid you didn't even fully understand it but made you curious enough to look things up and learn even more
I only ever read the one with Aunt Josephine and the house on a lake. Really enjoyed it, but could never find any of the other books. Kind of tempted to read them now just to know what I was missing out on but I did that when I was 18-19 with the new Skulduggery Pleasant books and all it did was spoil childhood nostalgia for me
Tim Curry did audiobooks for this series and they’re delightful. Not sure if he did every book but I remember listening to him read the carnival and hospital ones
This is the second discussion of this I’ve seen on the sub and it’s honestly violently, grippingly nostalgic and it’s cool to see how much it affected everyone else. I used to love these books, but I never quite knew why and I never expected such staying power but clearly it’s there
Watching Donny grow up hit deep for 13yo me. Nah I adore these books, tried to get my sister to read them before the magic is lost and ur too old :(
My 4th grade teacher read us the first one and the whole class got obsessed with the books. We spent that year going through damn near the whole series. I think she was just happy her kids liked reading. Shed cancel lessons just to let us read them more
That guy came to my elementary school
Did you guys know he played accordion on 69 love songs :)
god why am i not surprised lol
There is a whole album by them where they summarize the books in a very funny way https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mPU9cTAXZPCj4RQpSvDsB8q5eqsLYNrNs&si=s7MWknJbrUQ-sOXc
these books made me too much of a smartass as a kid once i started "predicting" the plot twists before they were revealed. it was over. someone time travel and tell 8 year old me she wasn't that smart. did appreciate the risqué material where every book recommended skirted around the subject of child abuse.
These were so good. Seeing that cover brought back a rush of feeling like a kid.
Of course everybody else in this sub has read these books, makes me so happy.
I mean I liked both series.