I Could Write If I Was Rich.

The Picture of Dorian Gray...reading it. Loving it. But there are some things you should know going in.

1.) Skip Chapter 11 altogether. Apparently Oscar Wilde didn't know how to show the passage of time without boring everyone to tears. It's simply an account of all the things that Dorian became interested in while he was aging (or, not aging, as it were) and it is too tedious to even go into in this short description.

2.) Even today this book may test some of your ideals. There is a character named Lord Henry who is pretty much evil incarnate. He espouses these outlandish ideas that he doesn't really believe fully himself, but that he can argue extraordinarily well. So these ideas take hold with our young Dorian Gray, who is both very naive and very impressionable and he actually lives them...which does not turn out well.

3.) Basically, you are reading the slow demise of morality in a formerly neutral person. And there's not much else to say about that.

4.) The title of this post is a mixture of the book and what I realized when I was on vacation. In the book, the only reason Dorian is able to do any of the bad things he does(like opium addiction, ruining of women (ooo-lala), and eventually murder) is because he has the means to do it. He's very wealthy. Not everyone could sustain themselves on completely idle pastimes like jewel collecting or fashion obsession because not everyone is rich beyond belief. It's easy to be creative when there's not pressure for your creations to sustain your living.