Books to Read Poster No 51

 

Hooray, over the top and on the downward slope, if only just.

Book No 51, if you haven;t guessed from the wee picture, was The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. 

I read this as a teenager and that's probably the best time to read it. Now, although the basic premise is interesting, and Wilde has some pertinent things to say about society, hypocrisy, aestheticism and even decadence and its interplay with religiosity, I find it pretentious  and self conscious piffle. If he had reined in his love for the witty epigram every once in a while it would have made for  a better book. 

The version I listened to was a free one from Audible and the text might have been more bearable with a different narrator, The book was 'read' or perhaps 'overperformed' would be a better way of putting it, by Russell Tovey. I have no idea where he got his concept of upper class accents but nowhere anchored in reality, that's for sure.  As another Audible reviewer put it, all his female characters sounded like pantomime dames. As far as the narration went, he sounded by turns bored and baffled and as for his pronunciation. - does no-one at Audible ever check that their performers know how to say things? I had this with Frankenstein and it was bad, but it wasn't as bad as this. I lost count of them but some real standouts were 

comeliness pronounced to rhyme with lonelyness

BROCK-aid with the stress on the first syllable, presumably some sort of charitable push to help dying badgers, rather than a fine textile

hick-coffing for hiccoughing

and Ri-MIN-i for Rimini. 

Here's a sad thought; he was paid to massacre the English language like this. 

This is the last blog post for a while. Tomorrow we set off for points south and then east as we make our way to Savonlinna for the opera festival. Back here I hope just before the end of the month.