Carina and I recently had an argument about whether Lemony Snicket's new (and next-to-last) book was properly enjoyed sitting on a neatly made bed or while curled in a cramped coach seat on an overnight train out of Washington D.C. Since I snagged my copy from the awful bookstore in Union Station, I unsurprisingly defended the latter.

Anyway, it is hard to explain to the unitiated why these books are great, great in a way that Harry Potter will never be. The deliberately-too-complicated wordplay, the heavy-but-not-too-heavy irony, and so on. The books also get better at the series wears on and the relevant moral issues get more and more thick. The Slippery Slope marks the turn to what I think of as the "modern" era of the Baudelaire children, but the transformation here, and the very real question about whether they are as innocent as they purport to be, may be the best yet. Only one more book!