Review of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Incredible. I choose this book expecting a dive into ideas about intellectual beauty, but was pleasantly surprised. The characters are so, so interesting, the plot is unique and well-executed, and the writing is fantastic. I don't know how it happened, but Wilde somehow makes hedonism beautiful and intellectual. For context, I hate hedonism, so this is really impressive. The characters are perfect for the story: Henry is the immoral "devil" while Basil is the moral "angel" on Dorian's shoulder. Dorian is also made out to be a child-like character, a sort of pristine innocent boy really for molding by his two father-like characters. The plot is the classic tell-tale-heart-esque story about a guilty conscience, but it's unique in that the "heart" is the painting of himself, not just a figment of his imagination. So we can see him deal with actually trying to physically deal with his conscience, see it interact with other people and the real world. There is also fantastic foreshadowing that was such a surprise. This is probably just me but I was skeptical about the magic of the painting for a big part of the book, which created an intrigue. Some see a lot of homosexuality in the book, but personally, I don't really see much evidence for it other than the sexism in the book (which was characteristic of the time ig). Only one critique of the book and that is the boring opening. Easily one of my top 5 books.