Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Title: Coraline
Author: Neil Gaiman
Publication Date: 2002
Length: 162 pages

When Coraline goes through a doorway in her house, one which is supposed to be a bricked off doorway between her flat and an unoccupied one, she finds herself in a flat much like her own, where she has an other mother and an other father, who want her to stay with them forever.

This story is delightfully creepy. Neil Gaiman's excellent writing and really weird imagination had me giggling and shuddering throughout. I really liked how Coraline's other mother started off being described as just like her real mother, but with buttons for eyes, and as the story progressed she was described as less and less human (and the illustrations get creepier and creepier to match).

I definitely recommend this for any Neil Gaiman fans who haven't already read it (I can't believe it took me this long), as well as anyone else who enjoys pleasantly disturbing stories. 5 stars!

John Dies at the End by David Wong

This is the cover folded out; the front cover alone didn't do it justice!

Title: John Dies at the End
Author: David Wong
Publication Date: October 2009
Length: 375 pages

It's hard to even summarise what this book is about. OK, so there's this drug known as Soy Sauce. Taking it either allows you to see weird things that don't belong in this world, or possibly actually opens a hole to let those things in. The main characters, David and John, use the sauce to try to defend the Earth against these various weird alternate dimension things. Basically this book is just really, really weird.

The whole thing is basically a series of weird things happening. Sometimes they are also disgusting things. There are lots of monsters made entirely of bugs, and stuff like that (one monster made entirely of cuts of meat from a freezer).

The overarching story (if you can call it that) is that John is telling his story to a reporter. As the reporter gets more and more incredulous, but out of morbid curiosity or something still chooses to keep listening, John talks about a series of events that are roughly broken into 3 bigger stories... I'm doing a bad job at this, because seriously, it's just very random and kind of hard to explain.

I liked it! It was weird, and occasionally I would either laugh out loud or visibly shudder in public. You may or may not like it. It will depend on your personality way more than the average book does! But I recommend it.

This has been a vague review by Lianne Lavoie! 4 stars.

This book counts towards the Read Your OWN Library! Challenge (hosted by The Beauty of Eclecticism) for March. For April, my book for the challenge will be The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson. This book also counts for the 2012 A-Z Book Challenge and the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.

A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket

Note: Since I read the first 12 books of this series before I started this blog, but just now read the last book, this is a review of the whole series.


Title: A Series of Unfortunate Events
Author: Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler)
Publication Date: 1999 - 2006
Length: 13 books

A Series of Unfortunate Events tells the story of three orphans named Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire. The first book, the Bad Beginning, starts with the children learning of the death of their parents in a fire that destroyed their home. Mr. Poe, a friend of their parents', is in charge of finding a home for the Baudelaires, a task at which he fails miserably, putting them with one dreadful guardian after another, starting with the terrifying Count Olaf.

The first three books in the series were definitely the best. In The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window, Olaf is a great villain. You'll find yourself hating all adult characters for their intense stupidity, but in a way that makes for a great story.

Spoiler Alert if you haven't read at least book 5

Although, it's not until Book the Fifth, The Austere Academy, that the ongoing mysteries of the series really get started. The Baudelaires meet the Quagmire triplets, who I wish had more of a role in the rest of the series than they did. The Quagmire's do some research to try to help the Baudelaire's, but all they can tell them is the cryptic acronym VFD before they're dragged away by Count Olaf.

End of Spoiler Alert

The problem I had with this series was that you don't get enough answers. I know that's supposed to be part of its charm or whatever, but I would have liked more mysteries to be solved. As it is, don't expect very many of them to be explained at all. (Note: I haven't read Lemony Snicket's autobiography yet, so to be fair, there could be a few more answers in store for me, but I rather doubt it.)

Also, there's a theme in the last few books that I don't particularly care for. The Baudelaires start to think of themselves as almost as guilty as the villains. They keep parts of their story secret because they're afraid that others will see them as bad people. The trouble is, they never do anything bad. In fact, I'd argue that they're too good. There comes a time, when the system has obviously completely failed you, and your life is constantly in danger, when most normal people would try to defend themselves even outside of the law, but the Baudelaires are determined that Olaf should only be punished through the justice system, even after that fails utterly. It just seems a bit unrealistic. I mean, the guy is trying to kill them.

Now, I don't want to give the impression that I didn't like the series overall. The writing is clever, the characters lovable. The mysteries, for all I wish that they were solved, were delightful, and really kept me curious. And even if the later books were in some ways not as good as the earlier books (which were truly wonderful), the series still deserves to be read in its entirety, because the Baudelaires' story is one that should not be cut short.

Oh, and a note about The Beatrice Letters: I was right. That book should have waited until after the end of the series. It came out shortly before The End, but made no sense. Having read The End, a lot of The Beatrice Letters finally makes sense to me, and I wish I'd waited to read it until after the series. For once, I go against publishing order!

The Beatrice Letters by Lemony Snicket

Title: The Beatrice Letters
Author: Lemony Snicket
Publication Date: September 2006
Length: 72 pages (hardcover)

The blurb for this book is simply this:

Top secret—only for readers deeply interested in the Baudelaire case. How I pity these readers

With all due respect,
Lemony Snicket

This book is fun, but confusing. Basically, it consists of a series of letters, alternating between letters from Lemony Snicket to Beatrice Baudelaire and letters from Beatrice Baudelaire to Lemony Snicket. However, you'll soon realise that it's not really that simple, and also that the letters are not strictly in chronological order. One conclusion I came to is that you should read The End before you read this book (which I haven't yet). This book came out shortly before The End (the last book in A Series of Unfortunate Events), but I found myself rather lost until I looked things up online, and it seems that things would have been clearer if I'd read the last book.

On the other hand, the book is fun to read. There are letters (of the alphabet) in between the letters (that one writes) (he totally made this confusing on purpose) that you pop out of the page, and at the end you move them around to find what they spell (they can spell two things, neither of which actually gives you any hints). So that was fun.

And of course Lemony Snicket's writing style makes everything he writes fun to read. His writing is so funny that it makes me have to share a whole bunch of quotes with you. So here they are:

"I go to bed early and rise late and feel as if I have hardly slept, probably because I have been reading almost the entire time."

"I never want to be apart from you again, Beatrice, except in the restroom, at work, and when one of us is at a movie that the other does not want to see."

"I received all two hundred pages of your book explaining why you cannot marry me, and I gave the carrier pigeons as much seed as they could eat, and I brushed their feathers with my trembling fingers, and bathed their beaks in my tears."

"I will love you even if you announce that the poetry of Edgar Guest is the best in the world and even if you announce that the work of Zilpha Keatley Snyder is unbearably tedious."

That Zilpha Keatley Snyder line made me sooo happy because I LOVE The Egypt Game and it seems so many people have never heard of it.

So basically, the book is fun in a Lemony Snicket kind of way (a phrase which here means "really quite hilarious"), so if you're a fan of the series this is a must-read. But I'd wait until you're done the 13 books of the series itself before reading this one, because I just found it a bit too confusing not having read the last book.