So.
I'm done with all 13 books of the A Series of Unfortunate Events series. Like with Harry Potter, reading the last chapter, the last few words, made me...sad. Reading a book series could do that to you. It's like saying good-bye to someone that has been your constant companion.
When I first saw these books, I thought they were merely children's books, you know, with really predictable endings and a shallow plot. I don't know what made me buy the first six books (in paperback) on a book fair about two years ago. I thought that the series only consists of those six books but I was shocked that it has actually 13! And the remaining seven aren't available in paperback anymore so I told myself that there's no way I could finish and collect all 13. But that was impossible since I got so hooked and each book contains mystery sfter mystery so I couldn't see how I can stop. So yeah, I collected all 13, better that than sleepless nights. OK, exaggeration...
And now I'm finally done and I guess I could say that there's more to the book than meets the eye. Snicket's style is so unique. There are parts wherein I'm snickering and there also parts wherein the words made me just stop and think for a while. I wanted to highlight those words in orange ink that glows. But I didn't of course. It's just that, there's truth to those descriptions of feelings that we encounter everyday during the course of our lives. Lemony Snicket was able to describe them, along with things like fate, miracles, darkness, etc. in a totally different way. And what could be cooler than that, huh?

Here are some quotes taken from the books which either threw me into a fit of giggles, causing my family members to threaten me with a straitjacket or threw me into a "pensive mood", a phrase which here means "closed the book for a while and stared into space, thinking how a remarkable writer Lemony Snicket is for writing those remarkable things." ;-D

"The moral of 'The Three Bears,' for instance, is 'Never break into someone else's house." The moral of "Snow White" is "Never eat apples." The moral of World War One is "Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand."

-from Book the Fourth: The Miserable Mill

"Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make--bombs for instance, or strawberry shortcake--if you make even the tiniest mistake you can find yourself in terrible trouble."

-from Book the Fifth: The Austere Academy

"Miracles are like meatballs because nobody knows what they are made of, where they came from or how often they should appear."

-from Book the Ninth: The Carnivorous Carnival

"But the sad truth is that the truth is sad, and what you want does not matter. A series of unfortunate events can happen to anyone, no matter what they want."

-from Book the Ninth: The Carnivorous Carnival

"Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like."

-from Book the Tenth: The Slippey Slope

"These are dark days, as dark as a crow flying through a pitch black night."

-from Book the Twelfth: The Penultimate Peril

"The world is a wicked place."

-from Book the Thirteenth: The End

"Of course I'm trying to trick you! That's the way of the world, Baudelaires. Everyone runs around with their secrets and their schemes, trying to outwit everyone else."

-from Book the Thirteenth: The End

"Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the crimes, follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother's wombs, and there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women."

-from Book the Thirteenth: The End