Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

★★★★ It's not that I resisted reading this, it's more that it just wasn't really on my radar.  It was gifted to me by a friend as an epub, and I knew it was fairly long so it appealed to me as something that I could read while traveling.  I made the mistake of starting it last Thursday, and devoured it in a weekend, and anticipate starting the second book in the series as soon as I can get it loaded on my iPad. I resisted looking at anything about the HBO series until I was finished with the book.  I really like being able to imagine the characters and wonder about how they look when they do things.  Characters are seldom well visualized from the beginning for me.  It takes a while before I know what they look like in my head.  I didn't want to spoil my own imaginings with how some producer thinks they look.  I took a peek after I finished the book because at that point, I felt like my ideas were well enough ingrained to resist alteration by some pictures.  I'm gla

★ ★ ★ ★   I was ridiculously ill with a sinus infection when I found this on the living room sofa like a literary present to the part of me that wanted to be a kid, reading in bed while my mom brought me something hot to drink.  I had to make my beverage myself, but finding the book was a really nice treat.  It was Kristen's and I stole it for the 2 hours it took me to read.  The Bad Beginning is a short little novella and a great read.  Having never seen the movie, I was still able to very vividly conjure up images of the characters.  The descriptions are not particularly thorough,  but the details Mr. Snicket (a pseudonym) does provide are incredibly evocative and allow you to fill in all the gray areas with the physical characteristics you think go along with his opinionated descriptions.   The writing is clever enough to be entertaining for an adult, but simple enough to be appropriate for children. I was really surprised by how many things I've read about people not b