Went to the bookstore today. As I'm trying to give myself a little rest from pulp fantasy/sf for awhile, one of the books I picked up was Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. It's something I've been meaning to look at for awhile, I learned a bit about him when I was in Ireland and he's a very interesting guy, and I've seen a movie adaptation of one of his plays that was quite good.

Not as good as I expected, though. I admit, I'm only about thirty or forty pages in, but the old style of writing is getting to me. Basically, one or the other of the characters will just start in on some subject or other and let fly. I DO realize they're trying to set up the premise (I haven't gotten to it yet, but I understand that basically the portrait of Dorian Gray grows older while Dorian Gray himself remains ageless), but it's still widely annoying to read long lectures about the virtues of beauty or beauty vs intelligence, or being special vs ordinary.

Also, most of them seem to be excuses for Wilde to throw in a bunch of one-liners. It reminds me of a really bad sitcom pilot or a really bad movie that's supposed to be a comedy, but instead of paying attention to making the situations or characters intrinsically funny so that the comedy seems natural, it's just throwing out quip after quip, which get less and less funny because they just scream "look at me! I'm so clever!" Add to that, 19th century one liners are rather more bland than the 21th century ones I'm accustomed to, and you get a long speechs full of mediocre jokes that don't make the dumb speech one iota less boring.

Also I got About a Boy. Lately I've been slipping into this habit of seeing movies and then buying the books they're based on. It is quite better than reading the book then seeing the movie, because you don't feel depressed that they cut stuff out of the book you loved, you more feel like the book is building on a movie you loved. But anyway, it makes me feel guilty to pay like 14 dollars (it burns me books famous enough to be movies tend to be only available in the oversized format that costs twice as much) for a book that I already know pretty much what happens in.

Aside from the guilt, it was very good, you got to see more what was going on inside the character's heads, which is one of the bigger atvantages books have over movies (though About a Boy the movie does have some voiceover).

Another thing I found interesting was that the book was purposefully set in '93-94 to sort of include Kurt Cobain's suicide (whereas specific dates and Cobain aren't really mentioned in the movie). I could see how it tied in very well with a number of things going on in the book, but I found it most interesting that the kid in the novel probably works out to be about the same age I was back then. And both of us were totally lonely and clueless about that time. I remember having no idea what grunge was, just knowing that flannel was big. And not even understanding that, going out and getting brightly colored flannels, even a pink and blue one I have to this day. And I really didn't know anything about any music recorded since 1969, unless you count Achy Breaky Heart. The parallels between Marcus and I made me kind of sad, though. Because he learns to integrate himself and make friends at school, whereas I was 16 before I made any, which I then lost when I graduated high school, so am back to desperately lonely loser again, even though I'm twenty freakin' two and should damn well know how to socialize properly by now.

The other book I got was a pulp fantasy novel despite my intentions, but I don't know how it is yet as I've not started.