#1: Read one book for each month of the project OUTSIDE of school books (MAKE UP BOOK!)

I have SO much make-up reading to do... but now that I'm graduated and currently unemployed, I've got some time to do it in.

I saw the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray on a bookshelf by my sister-in-law's bedroom, and I asked her if she had to read it for class (she's a senior in high school). She said that she did, but that her teacher had ruined the ending for them in class and she lost interest in it; it was dry reading, anyways. I kind of knew that about Oscar Wilde after watching The Importance of Being Earnest (the Colin Firth version of course),  but it was a short 230 page read so I thought I'd give it a shot. I'm glad I did, because I learned a lot about Wilde and his importance in the literary world. Check it out:

The Picture of Dorian Gray was Wilde's first and only novel, and was actually used against him in court at the turn of the century in "gross indecency" trials...which was England's way of saying that it's not okay to be homosexual...or at least come out of the closet. Which is messed up. Dorian Gray came before his more famous plays, like Being Earnest and Salomé, and had to be revised twice in order to remove certain nuances - the preface to Dorian Gray contains a sort of defense to critics of "art for art's sake", and that viewing art as a source for society's moral code is pointless and deceiving. Oscar Wilde died just 10 years later (at the age of 46) in exile in France, after serving a sentence in Reading Gaol, a French prison.
 
I didn't necessarily love the book as a novel, nor do I really reason with aestheticism (then again, I'm from the 21st century), however I think that this novel is quite unique because of the relationship between Dorian Gray's plight and that of the Victorian society Wilde addresses. Lord Henry, one of the characters who influences Dorian to reject morality for vanity, plays the jester to Wilde's courtly readers, mocking their snuff-nosed views with paradox. That's what Oscar Wilde does best, and I couldn't really call myself an English major without reading him.

Seriously, though - without writers like Wilde who made a case for free expression and the widening of society's aesthetic sensibilities, what kind of novels would we be reading today? Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Lolita, Catcher in the Rye...even the mild sexuality in Twilight would've been questioned and protested. Which I think is hypocrisy - there is a long history of homosexuality and promiscuity in the English monarchy alone - ANCIENT GREECE, hello! How much does history owe to hedonism? I don't agree with "explicitness for explicitness' sake", but it is a fact that all authors enjoy freedoms of expression because of forefathers (and foremothers) who had the courage to create their art. And that's my own case for The Picture of Dorian Gray. Besides, Oscar Wilde looks a heck of a lot like Cameron Crowe.

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.

#1 - Read one book for each month of the project OUTSIDE of school books - November 2010

For this month, I chose another novella because I knew my time and willpower for leisurely reading would be short - but this time, I wish the reading was longer. I read Anthem by Ayn Rand, one of the great literary and social thinkers of the last century. (I borrowed it from Tommy's house in Texas...I'll send it back!)

The sleeping halls there were white and clean
and bare of all things save one hundred beds.

Originally published in 1938, this book came before George Orwell's 1984  and on the tail of Brave New World, but tells of the same dystopia that the authors fear humankind would let themselves slip into when power gets into the hands of few and takes individuality (or, in this book, "ego") from them. It's written as a sort of diary, from the hands of 21 year old Equality 7-2521, who refers to himself as "we", who feels like he has sinned against his collective brotherhood by allowing himself to have individual thoughts and preferences. It's a really interesting perspective, though it's a really big dramatization, but what Rand brought up in all of her works, especially Anthem, is true today. I really recommend it...makes you value your rights as an individual to think for yourself, act for yourself, and choose who you want to become. Giving it up, to anyone is to relinquish the fundamental essence of being a human. Like Rand says, a collective body cannot reason - only the individual can.

I am neither foe nor friend to my brothers, but such as each of them shall deserve of me. And to earn my love, my brothers must do more than to have been born. I do not grant my love without reason, nor to any chance passer-by who may wish to claim it. I honor men with my love. But honor is a thing to be earned.