Does a picture say more than a thousands words?

For many years the only fictional literature I read was fantasy. But earlier this year I decided that it was time to become a somewhat more “intellectual” reader and I bought my first Penguin Classic – Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The book is about a self absorbed young man named Dorian Gray and his obsession with his own beauty. Dorian’s beauty is not lost on the other characters in the book. There is Basil Hallward who false in love with Dorian and paints that ‘horrible’ painting which will prove to affect Dorian in so many ways.

In general I recommend everyone to read the old classics. I won’t preach about how much you can learn from these books but I would like to mention the satisfaction of reading one of the classics and then to connect the dots with the rest of the cultural history. It’s amazing how these sometimes quite easy read and short novels have affected and influenced our cultural history then and now.

Sluta sluta, börja börja.

Martin