Book-A-Day #100 (10/24): The Beatrice Letters by Lemony Snicket

Huzzah! I'm still hoping to make it to the end of the year, but, if I miss a day now, at least I've hit a big round number.

I've just written an awful lot about Lemony Snicket and "A Series of Unfortunate Events" (to which this book is a pendant), so I won't repeat myself. The Beatrice Letters is a sidebar to the series, published just before The End, though I think it makes more sense read after The End. (Many of the Amazon reviewers didn't pick up on the most important clue -- that not all women named Beatrice are the same person.)

This is apparently crammed with hidden messages, cryptograms, anagrams, and other word games, but I didn't try to decode it; I just read it. (I have a prejudice against books that cannot be enjoyed by just reading them, such as the kind of mysteries you're supposed to solve yourself and the kind of SF novel which requires the reader's flying slipstick to make sense.)

It's a neat physical object -- a two-section file folder with board covers, held together by an elastic band, in which is a poster and a softcover book (with sections that can be punched out to form letters -- not that I think anyone is actually going to do that). And it's an interesting extra bit of SUE-iana, for those who don't want the story to be quite over. But it still doesn't answer all of the lingering questions, of course -- as I said about The End, that's the point.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!
Edited 1/2/07: the huge list of links was getting annoying, and screwing up my Book-A-Day searches, so I've killed them in these posts that had them.