Isabella

“I suffered immensely. Then it passed away. I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can , except sentimentalists.”

I always find it a little pointless to comment on anything considered a classic. Everything to be said has already been said.
But this novel has always stuck with me, even when i first read it years ago and didnt really understand the crux of it.
Sometimes i'm still unsure i do.

The detrimental effects of influence that one person can inflict on another is genuinely terrifying — how one person can entirely alter the makeup of another person just by exisiting and relaying themselves, even if the former doesn't entirely mean to do this.
I have this odd concern about myself all the time — that i'm not really my own person but just a makeup of all the people around me and all the things and art I consume. That i'm nothing but flesh and bone and mannerisms and ideals and jokes that inherently aren't mine.
In this book, Lord Henry says that art has no influence upon action, that we can indulge in it without being privy to it. He doesn't see art for what it can be, what it becomes for Dorian.
Poison.

I had to claw my way through this book to the point that it's set me back on my reading goal for the year.
I wanted so bad to like this book, I tried so hard to get into it but none of it seemed like it wanted to tell a story more than it wanted to be meaninglessly edgy. It tries so hard to achieve an artistic twist on the grotesque but ends up just being too consumed in that and loses its grasp on anything else it wants to convey, I fear.

Toward the end I started to get into it a bit more but it just didn't seem worth it considering the other 300 pages were such a drag.

I'm not saying it's inherently a terrible book it just really didn't give me anything I wanted and at times feels like a cheap knockoff of a lot of other sci fi and fantasy I've encountered.