Interests and Skills
Klaus is an avid reader. His favorite book is The Water Cycle, Volume 196, but he also enjoys books dealing with multiple wars. He remembers virtually everything he reads, retaining information which often helps the Baudelaires to escape from situations that their enemy, Count Olaf, leads them to and places them in. As a result of this appetite for books, he speaks many languages. Klaus always seems to know the definition of words that leave others baffled, though there are certain words that even he does not know the meaning of, such as in loco parentis (mentioned in The Bad Beginning by Mr. Poe) and xenophobe (mentioned in The Ersatz Elevator by Jerome Squalor). Prior to the demise of Klaus's parents, his father used to take him to the Akhmatova Bookstore as a special treat. He revisits it with Jerome Squalor in The Ersatz Elevator.
In The Austere Academy, Klaus and Isadora, one of the Quagmire triplets, seem to be finding an interest in each other, but in the eleventh book, The Grim Grotto, Klaus receives his first kiss (and first heartbreak) from Fiona, a mycologist.
Read more about this topic: Klaus Baudelaire
Famous quotes containing the words interests and/or skills:
“Women are taught that their main goal in life is to serve others—first men, and later, children. This prescription leads to enormous problems, for it is supposed to be carried out as if women did not have needs of their own, as if one could serve others without simultaneously attending to one’s own interests and desires. Carried to its “perfection,” it produces the martyr syndrome or the smothering wife and mother.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“In the middle years of childhood, it is more important to keep alive and glowing the interest in finding out and to support this interest with skills and techniques related to the process of finding out than to specify any particular piece of subject matter as inviolate.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)