Although his books are read widely and are quite well known ,the best thing about these books is the name.
Nobody wants to read "Sunshine and Cocktails: the happiness trilogy".
The name of the series is almost captivating. When I first saw the book at a fair, I thought " This is it. My next read". It is the most fundamental qualities of a good book that the first and foremost thought you experience at the sight of it is yes, this book is great, I already know it.
The main idea behind the books was what horrible things could happen to orphans. Honestly seems sinister but the books deal with such situations where the orphans are in grave circumstances. And everyone loves the books.
Before the last installment of the books, Handler released a book parallel to his series,
The Beatrice letter or The letter to Beatrice.
The story goes that Lemony Snicket was in love with Beatrice Baudelaire but she married someone else for some unknown reason. She had three children. Beatrice and her husband died in a fire leaving three orphans behind. "A series of unfortunate events" spews the story of the 3 Baudelaire orphans.
There is also a Netflix adaptation of the books which was quite popular but the thing is if you watch only the series and not read it than you probably might miss possibly the greatest love letter in existence.
Lemony Snicket professes his love for Beatrice in his six letters. Beatrice writes him six letter back. All those letters are a must read. But the best part of those letters are these beautiful paragraphs:
"I will love you as a taxi loves the muddy splash of a puddle and as a library loves the patient tick of a clock. I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong. I will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies, and I will love you as the banana peel loves the shoe of a man who was just struck by a shingle falling off a house. I will love you as a volunteer fire department loves rushing into burning buildings and as burning buildings love to chase them back out, and as a parachute loves to leave a blimp and as a blimp operator loves to chase after it. I will love you as a dagger loves a certain person’s back, and as a certain person loves to wear daggerproof tunics, and as a daggerproof tunic loves to go to a certain dry cleaning facility, and how a certain employee of a dry cleaning facility loves to stay up late with a pair of binoculars, watching a dagger factory for hours in the hopes of catching a burglar, and as a burglar loves sneaking up behind people with binoculars, suddenly realizing that she has left her dagger at home. I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled. I will love you until every fire is extinguished and until every home is rebuilt form the handsomest and most susceptible of woods, and until every criminal is handcuffed by the laziest of policemen. I will love you until M. hates snakes and J. hates grammar, and I will love you until C. realizes S. is not worthy of his love and N. realizes he is not worthy of the V. I will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple, and until the apple hates a tree and the tree hates a nest, and until a bird hates a tree and an apple hates a nest, although honestly I cannot imagine that last occurrence no matter how hard I try. I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from skim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and no matter how I am discovered after what happens to me happens to me as I am discovering this. I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else – your co-star, perhaps, or Y., or even O., or anyone Z. through A., even R. although sadly I believe it will be quite some time before two women can be allowed to marry – and I will love you if you have a child, and I will love you if you have two children, or three children, or even more, although I personally think three is plenty, and I will love you if you never marry at all, and never have children, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all, and I must say that on late, cold nights I prefer this scenario out of all the scenarios I have mentioned. That, Beatrice, is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way."
I am not entirely proud of the fact that I think about these lines on a regular basis. I think of them when I hide my pens in my drawer's secret compartment and I think of them when my friends promise to meet me next Tuesday. I think of them when I see fire crackling and I think of them when I see a murder of crows, cawing away. For some reason or the other, I think that he did not write these letter with pen and ink, he directly poured his heart into these lines. And if the original letters existed, if there was such a thing, I think they would smell like blood and tears.
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