Reader's Advisory

Today was a busy day for me. I had meetings and appointments throughout the course of the day, and between the abrupt and ongoing (yes, simultaneously abrupt and ongoing) grind of budgeting and planning, I tried to cram in the usual emails, messages and phone calls.

Yet the highlight of my day was a student request to help locate a book. I was moving from one thing to another, and moving quick as I could go, when I saw a student wandering from stack to stack with a certain look I've come to recognize on sight: vaguely confused curiosity united with awkward, constructed casualness. The "I'm lost, but I don't want it to be too obvious" look. (Don't laugh. Adults wear it too.)

I re-ordered my priorities on the spot and was able to help him find what he was looking for: The Portrait of Dorian Gray. (Not even an assigned text! Be still, my librarian heart.)

Oscar Wilde is one of my favorite literary personalities, and I find his work rich with meaning and humor. His Portrait is grim and dark, all the wry observations of Victorian wealth layered like soot in musing, intent turn of phrase. I always read that particular work hearing the voice of Dorian Gray, and it's possible to find the pieces of the country mouse starving into selfish ruthlessness in that prose. It makes you confront immortality, vanity, and the social responsibility of wealth.

"Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous. What did it matter what happened to the coloured image on the canvas? He would be safe. That was everything."