These books are much easier to deal with on the Kindle. Something about paying for the fancy over-priced hardcovers for something that can be read faster than a Harry Potter book didn't feel satisfying when I don't actually have kids to read them to. When reading outside my demographic, these things helps.

Book 9 is where Snicket seems to almost entirely abandon a lot of the comfortable formula that propels the earlier books, and it serves the theme pretty damn well. The idea that giving people what they want and going with what it works can be a slow path to evil would prove a compelling argument in adult fiction. To have something so oddly subtle forwarded by one of these books is downright surprising.

More than anything it's nice to see the littlest one get a new shtick besides just biting things and saying nonsense words that her siblings have to translate. It's one of many ways this book shows that the author started to get restless with his own formula. Or perhaps he's trying to illustrate to children that at some point the rules don't always hold and can't be relied on for security. I can't tell how well he thought this all out.

One nice thing about the tone of the series is that I really don't know what will happen in book ten. When you set everything up with a generally tragic tone, it pulls away the safety net of every book ending on a positive concluding note. The last several books have ended with things worse than before rather than merely breaking even.

It has a lot of pull for a series that keeps insisting I not read it.