Find Out What’s For Breakfast With Lemony Snicket

For more than twenty years, Lemony Snicket has led millions of young readers through a mysterious world of bewildering questions and unfortunate events. With this latest book – a love letter to readers young and old about the vagaries of real life – Snicket takes us on a thought-provoking tour of his predilections…

Read an excerpt:

This morning I had poison for breakfast.

This book is about bewilderment, a word which here means “the feeling of being bewildered,” and “bewildered” is a word which here means “you don’t have any idea what is happening,” and “you” is a word which doesn’t just mean you. It means everyone. You have no idea what is happening, and nobody you know has any idea what is happening, and of course there are all the people you don’t know, which is most of the people in the world, and they don’t know what is happening either, and of course I don’t know what is happening or I wouldn’t have eaten poison for breakfast.

Everything that happens in this book is true, by which I mean that it all really happened, the poison and the poems, the deadly cactus and the hypnotic musician, the chicken and the egg and the fatal finale, a phrase which here means there is death at the end of the story. But the story begins at breakfast, which I fixed myself, as I enjoy doing. It won’t be necessary for you to remember what I had for breakfast, because I will keep mentioning it, but it was

Tea

with honey,

a piece of toast

with cheese,

one sliced pear,

and an egg perfectly prepared,

and all of it, as I have mentioned, I fixed myself and ate all up while reading whatever I pleased.

I’ve been fixing my own breakfast for many years, beginning one summer when I was quite small, and I was with my family in a house we were borrowing. The house was on the shore of a lake which was quite large and quite cold, and a small flock of geese would gather on the sand, having loud conversations and making a mess. “The geese will go away,” the owner of the house told us, “as long as you don’t feed them,” but the geese never went away, not all summer. In the morning, I would wake up and go by myself to the kitchen. The early sun would shine on the lake, the ripples so shiny and sharp that they looked like knives.

I read something once that describes the sea as “all a case of knives” and I have never forgotten it. It is a description I admire very much, because it is so startling that you know no one else has thought of it before the author did, and yet so perfectly clear that you wonder why you never thought of it yourself. All good writing is like this. It is why a favorite book feels like an old friend and a new acquaintance at the same time, and the reason a favorite author can be a familiar figure and a mysterious stranger all at once.

Although I had not yet read “all a case of knives” when I was living next to the lake, I would sit and watch all the sharp and shiny bits of water outside the window as I waited for the toaster to do its work. At the time, all I liked for breakfast was a glass of juice and a single piece of toast with jam on it, so I would pour my own juice and put two pieces of bread into the toaster. When they were ready, I would spread jam on one of the pieces, and go out to the lake and feed the geese the other one. They loved the toast and they stayed all summer and no one ever knew why. I kept feeding them for two reasons: A, because I liked feeding them, and it didn’t seem fair to force the geese to look elsewhere for breakfast just because they were loud and had no bathroom of their own, and B, because I liked having a secret, and actually, as I write these two reasons, A and B, it seems to me that B is the more important one, and so B is actually A, the secret I liked having.

Sneaking out in the morning was such an interesting secret that I soon began to sneak out at night, which was even more interesting. The geese were gone by the time it was dark, and there was only the rustle of the water as I walked, the lake displaying its knives in the moonlight. Everything was quiet and noisy at the same time, and calm and spooky too. I was not yet writing books, not really, but I liked to stand in the darkness and think and write things down. Sometimes I wrote them down on paper and sometimes I just wrote them down in my mind.

I liked these times so much that I kept sneaking out at night when the summer was over and I was living in a house in a city. It is probably not necessary for me to describe the feeling of hurrying down a street at night, because you probably know how delicious it is already. It is, of course, also a little frightening, but feeling a little frightened is nothing compared to the dark blue sky and the one- eyed moon and the speedy chill of the night air through your pajamas. It is true that something terrible might happen to you walking around by yourself at night, which is why I always ran instead of walking, although this probably did not decrease my chances of something terrible happening. Something terrible can happen to you anytime—at breakfast, for instance.