Occasionally, as I ran a searching finger down the column of spines I’d pause at yours.
Pushed you to the bottom of the stack, threw you over for other books time and time again. I see enough of that on the city streets, I don’t need your judgement on my bookshelves as well. This isn’t a book, it’s a pre-packaged hipster experience, it’s something to be seen with, it’s something that wants to tell you what’s cool and how you should feel about it. This book, I told myself, is trying to be something. Everything about you from your painfully hip cover typeface to your “novel-by and art-by” declarations started to grate on me. Your illustrations, your thick paper, your heavily-blurbed back cover lush with accolades. If ever a book could be self-satisfied, I thought it would be you. I will have this book, I thought, and I took you home.īut the longer I left you on my shelf the more I resented your smug presence. Is it the words I tell myself I need, or just the covetousness that accompanies a rush of cover-lust? There you were on the shelf, distinct and red and beautiful - a waxy-covered, solid weight in my gluttonous hands.
It makes me wonder why I buy books sometimes, whether it’s truthfully the book itself I want or the simple act of acquisition I crave. I can be acerbic when I’m annoyed and there it is, the admission, the honest truth that I thought you would annoy me. A terse, thanks-but-no-thanks, it’s- not-me-it’s- you-now-kindly-get-lost note.
It wasn’t that long ago that I thought I would be writing you a break-up letter. He lives in San Francisco with the illustrator Lisa Brown, to whom he is married and with whom he has collaborated on several books and one son. His books have sold more than 70 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages, and have been adapted for film, stage and television, including the recent adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events for which he was awarded both the Peabody and the Writers Guild of America awards. Handler has received commissions from the San Francisco Symphony, Berkeley Repertory Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has collaborated with artist Maira Kalman on a series of books for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and with musicians Stephin Merritt (of the Magnetic Fields), Benjamin Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie), Colin Meloy (of the Decemberists) and Torquil Campbell (of Stars). Snicket’s first book for readers of all ages, Poison for Breakfast, will be published by Liveright/W.W. Daniel Handler is the author of seven novels, including Why We Broke Up, We Are Pirates, All The Dirty Parts and, most recently, Bottle Grove.Īs Lemony Snicket, he is responsible for numerous books for children, including the thirteen-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events, the four-volume All the Wrong Questions, and The Dark, which won the Charlotte Zolotow Award.
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