The Picture of Dorian Gray – 5/5 Stars I wasn’t sure I was going to listen to this audiobook or not. I like the era (love Sherlock Holmes) and I’ve read a handful of Oscar Wilde plays, but never his fiction. Luckily, Simon Prebble is a great reader (he narrated The Moonstone earlier this year for me and I like that a lot), and it turns out this is a great novel. It’s interesting because I have a huge schema for what I thought this […]
Dazzled by a Pretty Face: It Gets You Every Time
“The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.” – pg 161 Aaaaah, my dramatic boy Oscar Wilde did cause a stir, didn’t he? And it’s kind of ironic that this line was included in a book that then faced so much controversy and was considered immoral, huh? But there are indeed some psychological truths to be found in this novel, even after all this time. I first read this novel a few years ago and enjoyed […]
All art is quite useless.
Sometimes the classics are classics for a reason. The Picture of Dorian Gray is playful, imaginative, and dark in all the right places. Even today its witty one-liners shine in this fast paced tale of one beautiful man’s great decline. The plot is simple. Amidst flowers and a light summer breeze from the open door into the sunfilled garden Basil Hallward paints a picture of Dorian Gray. It is the most beautiful picture, made so both by Dorian Gray’s physical beauty as well as the intangible […]
“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
Welp. That was different. And very unlike the Wilde I have previously known and loved. I enjoyed the story of this book, but I think what I loved most about it were all the underhanded (and not so underhanded) things Wilde had to say about art and artists. I’m pretty sure all of you already know the basic premise, even if you haven’t read the thing. The beautiful and amoral Dorian Gray, who doesn’t age, has a secret portrait that bears all signs of corruption […]