So my own slackness at blogging my year of reading the "books that you'd expect a bookshop owner to have already read" has been pitiful. I plead only two things (a) the behemoth of a time-swallower that is the Bath Literature Festival and (b) the ploddiness of my third book of the year, about which more shortly. Before I get onto moaning about Book 3, I should quickly comment on Dorian Gray which was my second book of the year back in early February when my Literature Festival spreadsheet was but a twinkle in my laptop's eye.
To be honest I didn't really enjoy Dorian Gray. By choosing it I'd already broken one of my intended rules which was to concentrate on classics by authors that I had never read. I actually read and, as far as I can remember, thoroughly enjoyed "The Importance of Being Earnest" at school, and so I was pretty hopeful for Dorian Gray. But I found that once I'd chuckled along to a few dozen pages of ascerbic social comedy I started to dread having to wade through another 200 pages of it.
Towards the end I did warm to the plot itself and began to actually enjoy reading it rather than just looking out for clever bits of Wilde's wordsmithery that have since become standard put-downs. But by then I was pretty much as listless as the characters.
1 comment:
Ah, oh dear. Dorian Gray is next on my "to be read pile"... perhaps I'll cheat and skip it in favour of something else!
Are you including children's classics too?
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