Arcadia

by Tom Stoppard

Arcadia is actually a play rather than a book, but I read it rather than saw it performed. I actually had never heard of the play before a friend proposed it for a book club. I was much more familiar with Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which we also considered reading. The two plays have a lot in common, but I vastly preferred Arcadia, and couldn't believe that I had never heard of it before.

It's hard to state concisely what Arcadia is about. The whole play takes place in the room of an English country house, but the scenes alternate between the early 17th Century and the present day. The period scenes revolve around the family's tutor and his student, the brilliant young daughter of the family. The modern scenes involve researchers and professors trying to determine the identity of the hermit that lived on the residence and the events surrounding a visit to the house by Lord Byron. The dialogue is very clever and often very amusing, but it's also awash in philosophical and scientific concepts. Newtonian physics, chaos theory, determinism, entropy, classicism, romanticism, and scholarship all become topics of conversation at one point or another. But despite the  heavy topics, the dialogue is quick and light. As the play draws to a close, the two time periods begin to blend together, with props and sounds from one era appearing the other. By the final scene, characters from both periods appear on stage together, and their dialogue spliced together is both hilarious and poignant. 

I absolutely loved Arcadia, and wish I could see it performed. It just finished up a Broadway run in June, but it is often called Stoppard's finest play, so hopefully there will be more productions in the future.

The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings

by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde is easy to read and quite entertaining. This collection starts with The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is a fairly short novel. It's quite good, although rambling at times. I've only ever read Wilde's plays before, so it was strange to read his signature silly dialogue in a mostly serious novel. It was good, and worth the short read. This collection also included several of Wilde's plays: Landy Windermere's Fan, which was okay; An Ideal Husband, which is decent, and The Importance of Being Ernest, which is deliciously funny. My only problem about that last one is that I have seen the film adaptation, and I cannot imagine the characters of Jack, Agly, and Lady Bracknell as anyone but Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, and Judi Dench (respectively). The collection wraps up with the narrative poem "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," which he wrote in prison towards the end of his short but flamboyant life. It's a good assortment of his work; I highly recommend this collection to anyone wanting to get to know Oscar Wilde better.

This book also gets bonus points for using the famous photograph of Wilde taken by Napoleon Sarony, which was the subject of a very famous copyright lawsuit that established that photographs could be copyrighted.