Dog-eared pages

Since graduating, I’ve been able to read a lot of books, and it has been so nice reading for pleasure again! A little light summer reading:

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

I was pretty slow getting around to this one, but I had heard a lot about it for a long time. This was a delightful read! If you like books and movies that are character-driven, like I do, you might love this book. The story is set in post-WWII England and Guernsey, and is written almost entirely as a series of letters between characters, except for a hilarious passage of journal entries. It’s amazing what can be subtly conveyed about people and places through the letters, rather than the traditional first or third person narrative. The plot is very engaging. There is some sadness, but it is mostly light, and it has a sweet, happy ending. That may make the book sound shallow or uninteresting, but it’s not. Just read it and you’ll see!

A Series of Unfortunate Events

I began this series by Lemony Snicket (pseudonym for Daniel Handler) several years ago, but never finished because the final books hadn’t been released, then never got around to reading them once they were. I just swept through the entire series again, including the final books. You may have seen the movie based on the first three books in the series, which was cute, but there is much more to the series than that. The plot revolves around three orphans—Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire—whose parents died in a mysterious fire, and who are continuously hunted by the evil Count Olaf who is trying to get his dirty hands on the family fortune. The first four or so books are very similar in plot and it almost begins to become tedious. But as the series continues, the plot thickens, which here means “the Baudelaires begin to uncover endless secrets and mysteries about their parents’ past, question whether people can be unequivocally noble or evil, or whether everyone is a mixture of both, and doubt the pure nobility of their own intentions”, rather than “the book you are reading becomes heavier and the pages become stiffer and harder to turn”.*

The books are indeed written at a level accessible by someone around the 5^th grade and up, but they are definitely not juvenile. They are cleverly written, with smart and sometimes humerous references that younger readers would miss. For example, Sunny speaks in a baby language which only her siblings can understand and translate, but readers can pick up on real meanings in her gibberish. There are fun quirks, like the dedication in the front of each book, and how there are 13 chapters in each of the 13 unlucky books. Snicket (who himself is a character in the books) constantly warns the reader that the book you are about to read will not have a happy ending, and to put down the book immediately if you prefer that sort of thing. I won't give away the nature of the end of The End (which is the title of the last book), but I will say that I found it satisfying.

*This sentence will be appreciated by anyone who has read the series.

I was going to add a few more books to this post, but saw that it was starting to get long, so I will save them for another time! What are some good books you have read so far this summer?