The Picture of Dorian Gray

I’ve been on a reading spree with my Kindle app on my Windows Phone 7.  I finished reading “En Route: A Paramedic’s Stories of Life, Death, and Everything in Between” last week.  It was an entertaining little book—a very easy read, as each chapter was essentially an anecdote written in colloquial English.  There wasn’t much of an end to the book, and it seemed to lose its purpose near the end.  I rated it a 4 stars out of 5 on my Kindle page (though it seems others are rating it higher, I didn’t feel it deserved a 5).  A worthy book for casual reading.

For my next book, I decided to take advantage of all the free classics and out-of-copyright pre-1923 eBooks available.  There are so many famous classic novels out there for which I have never read the full-text, and it makes me feel somewhat ignorant and unlearned.  As I perused the classics list, my eye happened across “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, and I knew that I had found my next book.

I first heard of the character “Dorian Gray” in the movie “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”.  It was not a well-received film by the critics, but, in keeping with my history of liking bad superhero movies, I really liked the movie, and was intrigued by the character of Dorian Gray.

The book was awesome.   5/5!  It’s a short little book (20 chapters) that was full of plot and intrigue.  It took me a week to get through it.  For a book written in the 1890s, it was a pretty easy read (though nowhere near as easy as “En Route”).  I remember trying to read some Dickens books back in high school and finding my mind wandering more often then not.  The book is laced with great quotable quotes (mostly from the colourful character of Lord Henry Wotton).  It is an extremely colourful and descriptive book (too much so at times—there were a couple chapters in the middle that seemed to go on and on about nothing; my only complaint).  If you read up on the life of its author, Oscar Wilde, (who apparently really only wrote this one novel), it all makes sense.  (As Wikipedia states, the book was not well received when it first came out, due to its strong “homoerotic overtones”.)

I am quite pleased I managed to get a book written in a pre-twentieth century book under my belt—that hasn’t happened since I was in high school over ten years ago.  :)  I’m looking forward to my next Kindle book already.