When I was younger I was not very good at reading. I was so bad at it that my younger sister was able to learn to read before I did. I even remember early into my schooling I had to go to someplace after school where they taught me the basics. In elementary school there were classes to help children who were testing below the average testing scores to get their scores up, I was put into the one for reading. My elementary school continued to place me into these classes until after the third grade. As much as everyone tried to raise my reading level, I never really saw the point. For the most part, reading was just something boring that I was never any good at, so I never really bothered trying to do it outside whatever assignments that my teachers made me do. It wasn’t until I was assigned to read The Bad Beginning in the third grade that I realised that books could actually be interesting.
Lemony Snicket’s narration was very different from anything that I had read before. None of the children’s books I was told to read had such an expressive narrator. As far as I had known, third person narrators were void of personality, just faceless voices that described what happened to the main characters. The way that Snicket told the story of the Baudelaire orphans that was also wrapped in the story of the character Snicket just entertained me for some reason. Another thing that attracted me was the story’s focus on three children and not just one child. If I was reading a story and found that I did not care for the main character’s personality (I felt that most of them were really bland), what was the point of continuing with the rest of it. With A Series of Unfortunate Events I was given three main characters with distinct personalities, if I did not like them there were still two more to relate to (however, this was never a problem the Baudelaires). I think what appealed to me the most is how morbid the story could get at times. It did not feel like it was a book for little kids like One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish; it felt like a book for older kids.