Book Club - "The Bad Beginning," A Series of Unfortunate Events #1 by Lemony Snicket

Welcome back to Book Club! Today we're looking at the first installment of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Bad Beginning. 

Surprise surprise, I was a big reader as a child. My parents encouraged it by frequently buying me books. One such book was The Bad Beginning, on virtue of the movie having come out at the time I was old enough to move onto more complex books, and like The Spiderwick Chronicles, Goosebumps, Hank the Cowdog, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Harry Potter, and Percy Jackson (say all of those five times fast) at around the same time, I absolutely loved it. I ate it up, and needed more. 

However, that was many, many years ago, and like the story of the Baudelaire orphans, the story of my encounter with A Series of Unfortunate Events is an unfortunate one, and does not have a happy ending. My parents never bought me anything past the third book, so I had to turn to my school library. This was fine for a while, as I managed to read all of the books...

...except for the very last, The End. In a twist of cruel fate, my school library did not have a copy. And I had no money with which to buy my own.

Yes, it is true -- I do not know how the story ends, reader... oh, woe is me!

Except, that was a lie. The story of my encounter with A Series of Unfortunate Events gets even more dreadful, because I do know how it ends. For, you see, I had encountered many a spoiler, on the Internet, regarding the end of the series; and I now know the supposed events of the final book through cultural osmosis - the word "osmosis" here means "learning things one does not want to know, simply by being around rude people," - and have a woefully semi-complete understanding of the narrative. 

...(pause for effect)...

If you couldn't tell, I still love these books. They were part of the pillar of children's literature I grew up on, and can probably be attributed to the reason I started writing. Whether it's through rose-tinted glasses or not, rereading The Bad Beginning was a trip down memory lane, and I'm happy to say I came away enjoying the wit of the story even more than I did when I was a child. 

The plot of A Series of Unfortunate Events is very simple. Three children, born into significant wealth, suddenly lose their home and their parents in a terrible fire, and thus are shuffled into the arms of their closest (geographically, not hereditarily) living relative, Count Olaf. They are then subject to abuse and mistreatment by him as he cooks up a way to steal their fortune. He fails the first time, and launches them into a 13 book series chronicling their misadventure into the hands of more and more guardians, Olaf chasing them down throughout, causing them grief with his villainy and mischief over and over again.

The story is positively oozing with style. It has been literal years since I read a children's book, and I forgot how simple diction needs to be for such a young audience -- but even so, The Bad Beginning delivers aesthetic comedy better than most of the adult books I've read even with this restriction. In fact, it often uses this crutch to its advantage, introducing complex words and defining them in humorous terms that really fit the parameters of the story's writing style, and characterizing the story's various people and places with comedic and exaggerated pessimism. 

Violet, Klaus, and Sunny -- the three main characters -- are heavily defined by their one outstanding trait (Violet being an inventor, Klaus a reader, and Sunny a curiously intelligent baby that likes biting things) and while not much of their characters go beyond this, they're still fun to read about because they're a perfect slate for constant misfortune. That sounds dark, but it's true. Part of the fun of these books is that they live up to their name; there is constant tragedy and suffering, most of which befalling the innocent kid protagonists. Some of it far worse than any child ought to suffer, some of it so mild and inconsequential that the resulting dichotomy is hilarious.

Count Olaf is the perfect villain for this kind of story. He is cartoonish and completely irredeemable. In this case, the relative blandness of both the protagonists and the antagonist only work to make the tone of the story stronger. This book is brilliant proof of the idea that all the rules of writing can be broken to great effect, if handled with care. The art of literature is not mathematical, or scientific. It's much more like painting. There are general guidelines to it, which can produce a structured work, but in breaking those  you can, quite possibly, make something even more interesting than if you'd followed the rules. 

Here's a good look at some of the book's style; 

 (Spoiler, but there are 13 of these books, and I doubt the first one would be unpredictable to an adult audience)

This brand of dry, dark wit is bleeding on nearly every page. And if my memory serves me, this continues throughout all the other books, too. 

I'm pretty busy these days. I'm writing a 10 part short story collection (which I will officially reveal soon), I'm writing the third novel of my fantasy series (and thus, fifth manuscript so far), I'm outlining the next book I'm going to write, and am dreadfully close to my deadline of having completed enough work to start looking for a route to publish. Not to mention I'm reading two enormous, doorstopper fantasy epics, A Song of Ice and Fire and The Stormlight Archive. But I wanted to start this series again because I missed it, and pined for that nostalgic feeling of rereading books you loved in childhood. I am quite elated to say that, even if this is just me stuck in the past, I think they hold up. At least the first one... and as such, on to book two! 

Thanks for reading, reader! I give The Bad Beginning by Daniel Handler Lemony Snicket an 8/10

  - Austin

Book Club - "Fist of the North Star" #1 by Tetsuo Hara & Buronson

Fist of the North Star! I just finished the first Viz hardcover volume, and I have some thoughts. 

But I'm not quite sure how to segue into an introduction for it. Does it need one? Is it still obscure enough to where readers of this blog might be unfamiliar? Or is it the classic many underground-anime aficionados say it is? I'm willing to bet most readers may not have a great understanding of what this legendary manga entails, simply due to geography. It's always interesting to see how pop-culture develops differently in each region. Fist of the North Star is a manga that has inspired shonen for decades, and is the source of the legendary "Omae wa mou, shinderu" meme. But despite that, it -- and many other older titles -- have stayed in semi obscurity in more mainstream western circles. 

...Uh...

Oh, who am I kidding. All of you fuckin' know what this shit is. A bit of the teenage anime reviewer came back out of me, there, hunting for a way to introduce our subject. I can do better. I can do better! Don't let me get away with shit like this again! 

Anywho -- Fist of the North Star is bonkers. It spares no expense, and instantly thrusts us into a nuclear post-apocalyptic, Mad Max-ian world where the strong survive and the weak are fodder for their whims. Kenshiro, our heroic protagonist, disagrees with this notion, and employs Hokuto Shinken (the manga's martial art/magic system) to mow down waves and waves of enemies. 

First and foremost, and it needs to be said -- the art of Fist of the North Star is absolutely fantastic. Dated in just the perfect way, with amazing panel flow, brilliant framing -- every inch of the story is full to the brim with style. And since it's so old, it really feels... different from much of the mainstream manga of today. It feels more real. Like it came from one mind (even though it's an artist/writer duo) and is on a single path of narrative, which is a sort of feeling that many stories today lack. The hyperviolence just adds to it all, giving the action some truly magnificent... er, well, badassery. That's the only way to put it. Fist of the North Star is a manly man's manga, and oozes testosterone from every pore. The story also moves at a breakneck speed, mowing through the protagonist's supposed great nemesis as quickly as it does all the mooks and drones he takes out in each chapter too. It's like an epileptic fever dream, with fists and explosions and muscles galore.

Despite this, the manga is light on story, with almost no depth at all. What you see is what you get, at least as far as thirteen chapters go. This is perfectly acceptable entertainment, and I certainly cannot speak of how it develops as it goes. But in perfect honesty, halfway through the first volume I stopped and wrote in my notebook, almost verbatim: 

"The novelty and action is enjoyable, but one volume is enough for me to have already gotten all I probably can. Each chapter is the same thing." 

And I stand by that. The scope escalates and the art is insane, but the tendencies of the protagonist (to be a heroic, stoic badass that beats up badies for justice) and the general concept of the world ensures that these adventures will, in all likelihood, be repeating the same few notes over and over again. 

However, I certainly do not regret picking up Fist of the North Star, and seeing where modern shonen -- and of course, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure -- have adapted some of their main ideas. Revisiting old media and art that has become a pillar for modern works is always a bit poignant, because it's a window into an era long gone, yet still continues to make ripples and waves. Influence is a fluid, everpresent thing. It's impossible to avoid it, as all things have taken from what already exists. A story like Fist of the North Star is timeless. And though it had many elements that didn't appeal to me, I think it's worthy of that timelessness. 

Thanks for reading. I may not have said much of substance in this post, it was hard to stretch my ideas in to full paragraphs. Even so, read on, Book Club! 

 

- Austin