Poison for Breakfast by Lemony Snicket

For more than twenty years, Lemony Snicket has led millions of young readers through a mysterious world of bewildering questions and unfortunate events. With this latest book - a love letter to readers young and old about the vagaries of real life - long-time fans and new readers alike will experience Snicket's distinctive voice in a new way.

This true story - as true as Lemony Snicket himself - begins with a puzzling note under his door: You had poison for breakfast. Following a winding trail of clues to solve the mystery of his own demise, Snicket takes us on a thought-provoking tour of his predilections...

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What a book.

My best advice? Take this slow and give it your full attention. This isn't a book to half read with the TV on or someone talking to you. I'm not sure it's even a novel; certainly, things happen, but the actual plot is more an excuse for Snicket to muse about various things that cross his mind as the morning passes. (Yes, I'm calling him Snicket because that's how all the characters address him. I know it's not his real name. Although by now, isn't Lemony Snicket just as recognisable as Daniel Handler?)

I recognised some of the philosophical stuff, but none of the books or films mentioned, which makes me feel like a pretty bad bookseller to be honest. I was pleased to see that they're all listed at the back - I'll be looking them up pretty quickly!

The tone was exactly like Snicket - check out this quote here;

I have always admired any store that sells only one thing, because it promises delight, the way a person who spends eight years learning how to make cake will probably make you a good cake, but a person who spends eight years as an aviator and a tailor and a math tutor and a trainer of bears in the circus will probably kill you in a plane he is flying very badly while wearing a shirt that doesn’t fit and fighting off an illbehaved bear, all the while insisting that seven times six is harmonica.

Such a Snicket thing to write! I laughed several times while I was reading. However, I did not laugh at Snicket's Roald Dahl moment, quoted below, because I was too busy trying to figure out how anyone can write something so beautiful;
We must try, all of us, a lot of the time, our best, and we must keep trying. We do not understand anything but we should try our best to understand each other. We should swim and walk in parks, thinking. We should watch movies and think about what might happen. We should buy food and think about where it comes from, and we should listen to music and wonder what it means. We should have conversations, real and imaginary, with translators handy so that everybody might understand everything we say. We may feel native to where we are, or feel displaced, or both, the way someone going on a journey is also a stranger in town, but nevertheless we should keep reading. We must read mysterious literature, and be as bewildered by it as we are by the world, and we should write down our ideas, turning our stories, as if by magic, into literature.

Just amazing. I'm so glad I read this, and I will be coming back to it over and over again.

NOTE: This book is listed as an adult book. There's nothing unsuitable for teens, but pick your teen carefully, because this is a very cerebral book that needs to be approached in a certain frame of mind. But please do try it; it's just wonderful.

Poison for Breakfast publishes on the 2nd of September, 2021. I received a free copy and am giving an honest review.