Books Read in 2004
Submitted by alyson on Wed, 07/07/2004 - 01:05
Tags:
- Sushi for Beginners by Marian Keyes
- A Place So Foreign... by Cory Doctorow
- Sense of Evil by Kay Hooper
- The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
- Chicago Haunts by Ursula Bielski
- The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- Shopaholic Takes Manhattan by Sophie Kinsella
- More Chicago Haunts by Ursula Bielski
- The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde
- Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
- Close-Up on Sunset Boulevard by Sam Staggs
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
Author Comments:
By no means a complete list.
Sophie Kinsella and Oscar Wilde...that's pretty eclectic taste! We had an interesting talk about The Picture of Dorian Gray in a class I took, trying to decide whether the moral ending was a concession to the Victorian public.
Some concession! Wasn't he put in jail for this book? I seem to remember reading that on the back cover of the book...
Well, it was submitted as evidence at Wilde's trial (one of them, anyway--there were three) for sodomy, and Wilde did end up serving time.
On the ending, yeah, I don't know if it is all that much of a concession--I mean, he decides not to confess, even though he does destroy the picture. My take is that it preserves the ambiguity of the rest of the book about whether you should try to do what you know to be right, or to do what you feel. Dorian chooses to compromise, and it kills him.
Previous to reading Dorian, I had no experience with Wilde's work, except for seeing Earnest once. I was surprised by how wildly different the two works were, but not in a bad way.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is probably my all-time favourite book ever.