The Picture of Dorian Gray

I started the year with "Right thing, right now", and I'm ending it with "wisdom takes work" (R.Holiday), but I'm happy to say that I'm now a bit "tired" of re-reading the same rehashing of other people's book, and I want to read the original ones. Which, actually, is the pont. I wanted to read classics, and devoured "The portrait of Dorian Gray" (O.Wilde), where maybe 50% of all the "as O.Wilde said..." quotes seem to come from (uttered by a single, incredibly obnoxious character.) I challenged myself to read "Les Miserables" (V.Hugo), and actually managed to get two tomes out of five down. Eminently quotable, heavily skippable - why on earth spend half a time on describing the ins and out of Waterloo, except to show off ? - and, surprisingly, at times, _funny_. The bio of Pierre Mendès France (J.Lacouture) was very much topical, given the mess in Franch politics. We had more PMs in one year than in a few chapters of the book. It's very weird to read that, at some point, some politicians were "liked" by the people - but lost power anyway.…

Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf Before this book I generally did not read, unless it was a Star Trek branded airport novel. I had just got an iPad and was rummaging around the Project Gutenberg texts they’d dumped into iBooks. I chose it impulsively. This book set my brain and heart on fire and opened the world of literature for me. It’s very specific, though, and I can’t -recommend- it to anyone. There is little spackle in this book, as if every sentence and scene is cropped a bit beyond the point of readability. But reading aloud it flows well. There is effectively no plot and a great deal of its merit is at the sentence level. Furthermore, this book in particular resonated with me emotionally. I was thirsty for more and read other classics. My favorites; To the Lighthouse, Picture of Dorian Grey and Thus Spake Zarathustra (the translation they have on Gutenberg). This hobby dominated my attention for years. What displaced it was I had to learn Polish. At first I tried to combine these; I read Charlotte’s Web, the Little Prince and Pulp (bukowski) in Polish. But it really wasn’t an effective way to continue and Polish was the priority. All other hobbies had to go.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray (by Oscar Wilde) is just so beautifully written. It was Oscar Wilde's only novel (he only needed one). It also has the absolute best preface of any book I've read: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/174/174-h/174-h.htm#chap00

the Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. We all create alter-egos that cover for our worst sins.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Check out http://www.librivox.org. They have a HUGE catalogue of audio recordings of public-domain works. Grab a list of the 100 classic books of all time and download them. Don Quixote, The Prince, Picture of Dorian Grey, Pride and Prejudice...