The Reptile Room
So I’m reading Lemony Snicket’s The Reptile Room, and I’m sort of wondering why I’m bothering with it. It’s pretty clear by now that I just don’t like kid-lit, and I didn’t even care that much for the first installment of this series, so why am I reading the sequel?
The boring actual answer is that I ran out of books to read on vacation, but the more interesting philosophical answer is that whenever there’s a type of book that’s insanely popular and gets good reviews from people with taste, I’m forced to assume that there’s something there that’s attracting people, and I’ll keep reading until I either find it, or manage to convince myself that it’s completely invisible to me. So in this sense, I read The Reptile Room for the same reason I read about a dozen Stephen King books back in junior high, despite not really liking any of them.
When it comes to Snicket, I see what people like. He’s not writing in the generic kid-lit voice that makes (for instance) Rowling’s books read exactly like every kids’ book ever written; he’s got his distinctive style, which manages to be legitimately funny at times — a definite rarity in the genre. Despite this, I still find myself shrugging at the book; it’s not bad, but the actively good moments are too rare to justify reading through the rest of the cotton-candy fluff. When it comes down to actual story-telling, the flat characters and obvious plotting obtrude too heavily and make the reader wonder if there’s not something else they could be doing.
As kid-lit goes, it’s good. But kid-lit doesn’t go very far.
Comments
I love this series, I think it’s hilarious. My enjoyment is not so much about the adventures of the Baudelaire orphans (although that does get interesting later on in the series), as it is about the style. The “Snicket” narrative voice, the puns, the humorous references to things no actual kid would ever get, I just love it all.
But, I am not really disagreeing with your comments, except for the perceived frequency at which “actively good moments” occur. It is IMO a brilliant parody of kiddie lit, but as such it uses all the conventions thereof, so it’s not going to be something you’d enjoy.
If you do intend to torture yourself by reading more of the series, do yourself a favor and skip the next two books, which have exactly the same plot as 1 and 2, and go directly to book 5. Book 5 also has the same plot, but it sets up some important stuff for the rest of the series, so it’s not skippable. The plot starts to mutate after book 5, and eventually sheds the new guardian-Count Olaf-lose guardian formula of the first 5 books, but I don’t think you’d really like the later books any better. They’re just not your cup of tea.