[I've been
reading]
The Bad Beginning

I hadn’t read any of these books before so I started at the beginning. This one wasn’t bad. It’s got sort of a cloying narrator, three kids in sorry circumstances, and a lot of people around them who are making those circumstances worse. The illustrations are great, the plots develop, such as they are, and the sher depth of description alone makes these books worthwhile for an adult reader as well as straightforward enough for a younger reader.