Book #13 Completed! "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde

First a brief interlude if you will....

So softball season starts in earnest here shortly. My thoughts have been preoccupied with this as our team has much to work on. Over the last three seasons we have successfully embarrassed ourselves and shamed our families by posting records of: 3 wins/11 losses, 3 wins/11 losses, and the coup de grâce season of 1 win/11 losses and a near all out brawl between members of our own team.

Now fair being fair, some of our stellar record I am sure is part my fault. See, I pitch for the team. The first season, even though it is recreational league slow pitch, some members of the other team like to make you throw strikes and if you don't, they are perfectly content to take walk after walk. Throwing a ball underhand that cannot be less than 6 feet off the ground and no more than 12 feet off the ground from 50 feet away and having to hit a target something like 13 inches wide by 23 inches long is more challenging than it sounds. That or I just suck. Add in the fact we play the spring and summer seasons when at night it is a comfortable 105 degrees on average and the whole thing is pretty challenging - or at least it is for me.

So I walked quite a few people in the first season and of course we lost. The second season and beyond I have gotten better at not walking batters but we have two other major issues as a team - we can't bat nor can we field. There was a game last season where literally every person in the field (including me) made an error sans the catcher - all in one inning. Sadly, we even practice for two months before the season starts.

So I have devised a plan. A grand plan that is sure to turn fortune in our favor and stem the bleeding that is our overall record. What is my plan you ask? Well, it's simple - I plan on hitting a home run that breaks the scoreboard this year.

No seriously, stop laughing - this is my plan. I figure that the scoreboard (which resides in left field) is about 10 feet beyond the outfield fence and is elevated about 10-15 feet. The outfield fence from home plate is about 305 feet. Accounting for my height and whatnot, I figure a batted ball needs to travel approximately 316 feet. Now I figure once I hit said home run and bust up the scoreboard, the team will be exponentially motivated and happy and play better. Furthermore, without the scoreboard working - we can't even tell if we are winning or how much we are losing by and that is a huge benefit in itself. Now, I just need to devise a scheme where I actually can hit the ball that far since the best I have done is the middle of the outfield so far....hmmm

Oh yeah the book. "The Picture of Dorian Gray" was written by Oscar Wilde in 1890. This is the only book that Wilde published, as he was rather fond of writing plays and poetry (which of course made him famous). Now, fair being fair - I have to admit that the extent of my knowledge of Dorian Gray was from watching "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and how this guy could not die. I gathered, contextually, that whatever bad things happened to him - it affected the painting of him and not his physical body. So I saw this and decided to give it a test drive.

It actually is an awesome book. Now, there are some parts where you just want to put an ice pick through your head or use the Pythagorean theorem to calculate how you could hit a 12 inch softball into a scorecard, but for the most part it is clever and damn amusing. The book opens with two friends, Basil and Lord Henry, talking about nothing in particular as they often did. Basil was a painter and Lord Henry was, well a Lord and had perfected the art of doing absolutely nothing. Basil was to paint that afternoon a sitting of a boy he had met named Dorian Gray. Obvious from the start that Basil is the positive moral conscience in the book and Lord Henry represents a darker force. As I continued through the book I would equate the relationship between Basil and Lord Henry as that of God vs. Lucifer or in other terms - the angel and devil on opposite shoulders telling one what to do. Enter Dorian Gray and both are enraptured in his physical beauty. Basil paints a picture of Dorian and when he is completed, all of the men are astounded by it's beauty. Dorian, being pretty and knowing that he is, states that the painting is remarkable and he wishes that he would stay like that forever and the painting be the one to bear the burden of age and illness. Guess what happens then????

So the story continues and Dorian gets older and more and more involved in things that he shouldn't. He is running about town with "loose" women, visiting opium dens, being a jackass in general, etc. His image in the painting gets older and more harrowed looking for each indiscretion he indulges in. He falls in love with a two bit actress at a slummy theatre and when he takes his friends to see her - she absolutely bombs. Dorian is furious and embarrassed, which causes him to tell her about how bad of an actress she must be and breaks off the engagement. Apparently this means she HAD to kill herself because the boy she had been seeing for two weeks and didn't like her anymore. From there it is just a downward spiral of bad actions and Dorian justifying his actions in his mind until things get out of control - he murders Basil, kind of loses his mind, and stabs the painting - which ends up killing his actual body.

But that is not what I want to talk about - I want to talk about Lord Henry. This guy is hilarious! I would drink and do nothing all day with this charming fellow. Here are some snippets of his wit and wisdom from the book:

• There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about
• The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
• There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written
• It is only the intellectually lost who never argue.
• It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
• I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
• I can sympathize with everything, except suffering

These are just some of his quotes from the first half of the book. In addition, he is not insufferably British and complains about them all the time - to the chagrin of his friends. This could be because Oscar Wilde was Irish and all of that drama.

Ok so for a rating. If it were just a book about Lord Henry, it would have gotten five Vroom's because he is damn funny to me. As such, overall I give the book:

Vroom, Vroom, Vroom, Vroom (4 out of 5 "Vroom's" on the motorcycle scale of awesomeness)