A challenge and Lemony Snicket

Today I signed up for a South Asia challenge -- this will dovetail with my effort to read books I own. A couple of years ago, I bought a volume of three novels by R.K. Narayan, and since I signed up to read five, that volume will constitute 3/5 of my effort. Then I want to read an additional book by M.J. Vassanji, who wrote one of the top books of the decade (see the countdown below) and maybe a book by Kamila Shamsie. Just in the past couple of years, I read The Assassin's Song by Vassanji and the very good A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif (the great thing about that book was how much of it was echoed in the film Charlie Wilson's War). If I get really ambitious, I might try Midnight's Children or A Suitable Boy; Midnight might be closer to my range.

Meanwhile, last week, Little, Brown announced that it bagged Daniel Handler to write two YA titles and four more Lemony Snicket books, but the post doesn't indicate that the Snicket novels will follow the Baudelaire orphans into late teenhood. I hope they do, but when they all went off into the Great Unknown, that may have been it for them. I miss the Snicket books, because they were a bunch of fun to read aloud, but Handler wrote a pretty good adult novel (Watch Your Mouth) and short stories (Adverbs), so I was hoping he pursued the realm of adult fiction. But I'm still looking forward to these new works.