Biblio Beau

Monday, June 29, 2009

80. Harris, Charlaine. Three Bedrooms, One Corpse. 240 pages. 6.29.09.

81. Wilde, Oscar. An Ideal Husband. 96 pages. 6.29.09.

Despite my deep and resounding love for Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey (for which I have given my sons the middle names Dorian and Henry), I have come to realize I have read shamefully little of his other work. Today I resolved to sit down with one of his well-known plays, and chose An Ideal Husband. The play is everything I've come to expect from Wilde; while the dialog doesn't sound particularly natural, it is infused with the wit and charm of Wilde's satirical authorial pressence, which carries the work well. I appreciated the parallel established between politics and marriage, and enjoyed the ever-present commentary on gender, fashion, society, and art (especially the aesthetic correlation established between Wilde's characters and known artists/styles). I look forward to reading more of Wilde's work - both drama and short stories - in the near future.

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Favorite Quotes

"To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching [...]. But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission..." - Oscar Wilde, "Letter to the Pall Mall Gazette on the Subject of 'The Best Hundred Books'" (qtd. Wright, Built of Books, 317).

"I wish you joy o'th' worm" - Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.270.

"The world must be peopled!" - Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." - Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

"That a man who has sons brings up chickens for his own table ... whereas daughters are chickens brought up for the tables of other men." - Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (77).

“No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett

And then there is more Oscar Wilde:

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."

"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit." - The Picture of Dorian Gray.

"Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal." - Personal Impressions of America

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint." - "The Children of the Poets", The Pall Mall Gazette

"There is no sin except stupidity." - The Critic as Artist

"One should always be a little improbable." - "Phrases and Philosophies for the use of the Young"

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple." - The Importance of Being Earnest

"Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity... we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance."
--- A.E. Newton