Book Review: The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

I'd seen this book on my Top 100 list since the beginning and had been interested in reading it almost as long. Now that I've finished it, I can confidently say that it is one of the best books that I have ever read. It is brilliantly written, the characters are unbelievable and the plot is original.

The story follows a young British socialite who through a series of events has a picture of himself that reflects his various moral indiscrections. The picture bears the manifestations of the man's sins while his youthful and attractive face stays exactly that way for decades. He becomes a morally decrepit person because there are no ramifications for himself.

If you've never read this book, it's worth a shot. It's an amazing novel that deserves its spot among the greatest of all-time.

An all-time personal favorite

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Guaranteed a spot on every vaild Top 100 ranking

Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger 
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift 

Maybe not my cup of tea but worthy of a Top 100 ranking

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Probable new contender for my own Top 100 list

The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy

Bucket list book

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Well worth a second read

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carre

Worth the read but questionable Top 100 ranking

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
The Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock

Why on earth did I waste the time needed to finish this book?

The Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

So bad I couldn't stomach reading the whole thing

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

List of Top 100 Novels of All-Time
(crossed out ones are the ones I've read for this project)

1. Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes
2. The Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
3. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
4. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
5. Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
6. Clarissa - Samuel Richardson
7. Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne
8. Dangerous Liaisons - Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
9. Emma - Jane Austen
10. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
11. Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love
12. The Black Sheep - Honore De Balzac
13. The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
14. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
15. Sybil - Benjamin Disraeli
16. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
18. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
19. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
20. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
21. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
22. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
23. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
24. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
25. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
26. The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
27. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
28. Daniel Deronda - George Eliot
29. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
30. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
31. Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
32. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
33. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
35. The Diary of a Nobody - George Grossmith
36. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
37. The Riddle of the Sands - Erskine Childers
38. The Call of the Wild - Jack London
39. Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
40. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
41. In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
42. The Rainbow - D.H. Lawrence
43. The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan
45. Ulysses - James Joyce
46. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
47. A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
48. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Trial - Franz Kafka
50. Men Without Women - Ernest Hemingway
51. Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine
52. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
53. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
54. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
55. USA - John Dos Passos
56. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
57. The Pursuit of Love - Nancy Mitford
58. The Plague - Albert Camus
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
60. Malone Dies - Samuel Beckett
61. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
62. Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor
63. Charlotte's Web - E.B. White
64. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
65. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
66. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
67. The Quiet American - Graham Greene
68. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
69. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
70. The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
71. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
73. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
74. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
75. Herzog - Saul Bellow
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
77. Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carre
79. Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
80. The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryla Bainbridge
81. The Executioner's Song - Norman Mailer
82. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino
83. A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul
84. Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee
85. Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
86. Lanark - Alasdair Gray
87. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
88. The BFG - Roald Dahl
89. The Periodic Table - Primo Levi
90. Money - Martin Amis
91. An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro
92. Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
94. Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie
95. LA Confidential - James Ellroy
96. Wise Children - Angela Carter
97. Atonement - Ian McEwan
98. Northern Lights - Philip Pullman
99. American Pastoral - Philip Roth
100. Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald