The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The Picture of Dorian Gray” is the book I selected this week. It was noted as a “Barnes and Noble Classic” and this summer I attempted to read all books on the “Classics” list. As noted by last week’s “Dracula”, the books did not get read before summer ended. Back on topic, the book is by Oscar Wilde, who always seems to have random quotes floating around inspirational topics.
The book itself was wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed the creepiness and very dark ideas throughout the book, strangely enough. I find I tend to like scary books better than scary movies, but even then “The Picture of Dorian Gray” wasn’t so scary as much as making you feel uncomfortable with issues such as beauty, sinning, vanity and life in general. The ending of the book is particularly disturbing and very enjoyable when Dorian Gray finally went insane and accidentally killed ‘himself’ or, as it really was, the idea of himself.
An interesting part of the book, once I had finished the book and began reading the introduction, was the play with homosexuality. There was plenty of women, and men, who fell ‘in love’ with Dorian because of how beautiful he was. This was unacceptable in the time period, and it struck as me as peculiar, why would Wilde write a random bit of information into the plotline? Then after reading Oscar Wilde’s life story in the introduction, it mentioned Wilde being possibly homosexual and I found this small piece of information very fascinating; relating to the plot.