Don't complain! I'm allowed to blog extra to make up for all those bloggers who are doing NaNoWriMo! That's the rules!

I love the Series of Unfortunate Events books. I think they are brilliant, both story-wise and writing-wise. Lemony Snicket is the best fake writer since Mark Twain.

Last I knew, there were 12 books. There were going to be 13 books, and I was eagerly awaiting news of the publication of the last book in the series. I figured, I read enough blogs and news feeds to read about Dodo Greene's passing from three different sources the day after the Anchor Bar jazz singer died, so someone is bound to mention the publication of such an important book!

But no one did. At least no one I read did. It came out on October 13th, a Friday, if you're interested, and I had no idea.

Until Thursday night, when I was at a church cell group gathering in someone's home. And I saw the Series of Unfortunate Events books on a prominent shelf in their living room. And I noticed a title I didn't recognize all the way on the right of the shelf. Book 13! The End! I bit my tongue for the rest of the discussion, and managed to enjoy a fantastic discussion about God and calling and the role of the church, but as soon as it was snack time, I made a grab for the book and ran away with it under my arm, fleeing for the border asked the hostess about the book and was kindly allowed to borrow it.

I finished it on Sunday night, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It didn't offer the most closure, hinting at more mysteries and questions at the end, unlike most children's books, but it also offered more of a sense of catharsis than I was expecting from a series of books that left three orphans in worse shape at the end of each book than they had been at the end of the last one.

You'll like it. Go read it.

And, if you happen to be a fan of both these books and ABC's Lost, like me, you might be surprised at all of the similarities you start to see. Might there be a schism on the island? Are the others, like VFD, partly good and partly bad? And how come all the cool characters keep dying?