Post by A comet crashing into Earth on Jun 29, 2015 4:55:00 GMT -5
I'm always on the lookout for opportunities to grab my friends by the ankles and have them volunteer to read A Series of Unfortunate Events. So far, I have not a single person IRL to talk to who have read all the way through the series, but at the moment I'm lending my copies to a friend who's quite excited about them, and who just finished TAA (I'm meeting her tonight and trading it for TEE). I immensely enjoy talking to her about the series, of course, but there's one problem (albeit a quite fun one, so i'm not bothered). I'm trying to condition her to the series by weaving their references into regular conversations - before she started TMM, I happened to bring up George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four (which we've discussed in school, so I knew she knew it), and right before TAA, I made a slightly odd comparison between our new government and Emperor Nero, just so I had a chance to make sure she knew the basics of the story. Still, she didn't pick up on either of those connections before I directly mentioned them to her after she'd read the respective books.
I'm not trying to showcase my friend being slow at picking up on things; she definitely isn't (despite her own polite claims). It's just an interesting experience to follow someone new to the series reading it, noticing what they pick up on and what they don't. I take it as a reminder just how immersed I've become in this universe, and how different it looks to a newcomer - and that kind of experience is part of why I keep pestering my friends to read the books.
There's a whole bunch of my friends who started reading, but few ever got past TMM. Have you had any similar or interesting experiences trying to make other people read Snicket's works?