Lemony Snicket: Beater of the Quarantine Blues

Little Women sits unopened on my nightstand. Piles of poetry anthologies I intended to dive into over spring break clutter my bookshelf. Novels I accumulated over the summer collect dust on their paper spines. My final week of school before spring break, I counted down the days until I would finally be afforded the luxury of a respite from junior year stress to crack open a book. Then, my school’s spring break extended indefinitely due to coronavirus, and I watched my motivation to read anything shrink exponentially every day.   

I read to escape, but coronavirus made it nearly impossible to get lost in the plot of any piece of fiction. Adorable romantic reads remind me of the normals the world lost to a pandemic. Young adult novels broadcast the teenage milestones I might miss out on. And apocalypse novels just send me into a panic. I spent the first week of quarantine lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling or mindlessly binging a television show. I missed the adventure that novels took me on and the incomparable sense of accomplishment I felt when I finished a book. But nothing motivated me to walk to my bookshelf.

Then Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events walked into my life. Yes, the intended audience of this series is at least five years younger than I am. Yes, these books max out at around 150 pages. Yes, I consider myself too old to read a children’s book. However, in a quarantined world where nothing seemed to matter anymore, I didn’t care. I flew through the pages of Snicket’s prose. I chuckled at the clever anecdotes and puns Snicket wove into the chapters. I sympathized with the extreme loss that Klaus, Violet, and Sunny felt. I physically jumped in my seat when Count Olaf entered a scene. Before I knew it, I reached the last page of The Bad Beginning, and didn’t hesitate to open the next installment of the Baudelaire’s tragic story. 

Reading Series of Unfortunate Events, I felt a safety blanket settle around me. The books felt accessible; reading these stories didn’t require hours of my time dedicated for emotional rollercoasters. Rather, I could read a chapter in spare moments I found between watching the news and online school assignments. Eventually these moments turned into full-blown reading sessions. I sat in my plush pink chair by a window sipping a cup of tea with my eyes glued to the pages of whichever edition of Series of Unfortunate Events I had reached. I fell back into my reading groove, and my love for reading now grew exponentially, with no curve in sight.

Because it is intended for younger audiences, A Series of Unfortunate Events allows me to read without the hassle of coming across burdensome vocabulary words. I don’t have to experience being emotionally broken apart just to read a book, either. These books remind of a simpler time when I read for hours on end after school. They drip with nostalgia that only makes me want to read them more. But don’t be fooled – A Series of Unfortunate Events is extremely thematically dark. I consider myself too old to be frightened by characters in non-horror stories. Yet, Count Olaf still gives me the heebie-jeebies. 

Lemony Snicket provided me with a world I didn’t realize could exist during the odd piece of history we are living through: a world worse than our current reality. The Baudelaire siblings tackled every hardship, from hypnotism to flesh eating slugs, that the universe could throw at them. If they could weather a storm of horrible circumstances from the middle of a hurricane, I could surely weather a pandemic from the comfort of my living room. Moreover, Snicket crafted a world free from any positive force. Even during the chaos of coronavirus, we see instances of kindness every day in the daily standing ovations for healthcare workers to nationwide movements to help people access shelter and food. In an odd way, the story of the Baudelaires provided me with a ray of hope. Though the world can get hectic and downright terrifying at times, at least the world fights together and in solidarity. The Baudelaires had to fight their battles alone, but we don’t have to.

As teachers asked what books their students were reading over the extended break, I first felt ashamed to admit I spent my days reading books written for children. But as the days went on, I shed this ridiculous sense of shame. Now I embrace that Lemony Snicket brings a rare smile and laugh to time full of uncertainties.