Review The Complete Short Fiction by Oscar Wilde

Maybe it's a good thing, maybe it's a bad thing or maybe it doesn't really matter, but I haven't read many classics to be very honest. Of course I've heard of them, but I never thought about actually reading them, because I always had these other books which seemed way more fun to read. 
I was so wrong.
After this book I promised myself something very important: I'm going to read way more classics.

Summary

The book is a compilation made by Ian Smalls. It contains many different stories by Oscar Wilde like "The Happy Prince", "The Fisherman and His Soul" and many others of other genres. Also included is a part on "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.", in which Wilde and his friend Erskine try to solve a literature mystery.

My opinion

Rate: 9.5/10

This book makes me want to read more and more classical books and has opened my heart a little bit more to literature!

The short stories by Wilde seem so innocent and cute, but have a lot more to them than may appear. By this I mean that, even though they are short with a few funny characters, mostly animals which I completely love, they all gives some message. Every story contains a moral and I just love how he put these morals into these short stories.

I love how, instead of using humans, he personifies objects and animals and give them a big role in some stories. Sometimes they interfere in human lives, but the story is still about them. And I loved this new perspective; though the animals and objects thought as humans, it still felt like a completely different experience, looking through an animal's or object's eyes.

And how sad the endings of these stories were!

Well, not all of them, but most of them ended so sadly, but I felt like that sadness had a great impact on me. It made the moral of the story stick more to me. Because in most of the stories the characters make mistakes that have, most times, fatal consequences for them, making you as a reader feel like; I definitely shouldn't do that. Nope. Bad plan.

I liked how he did that.

The part on "The Portrait of W.H." was the part that stuck with me an will stick with me the most. Seeing how Wilde poured himself into literature, in solving the a mysterious case on a specific character of Shakespeare's Sonnets, was utterly fascinating. Perhaps it wasn't Wilde at all, but anyhow - it makes me kind of want to dig deeper into stories too.

Maybe not till the point where I'll have to spend even more money on the story or commit suicide because someone didn't believe in my point of view, but solving mysteries sounds fun. 

I also really enjoyed the poems (in proseform!). They were just beautiful and though I'm not a believer of God, I find that Wilde has made the role of Him so beautiful and interesting in these poems.

Furthermore I find it funny to compare this volume of short stories to our stories nowadays and I see quite a big difference between them. I know from Latin class that writers around the Roman era mainly wrote stories to show the citizens how to live their lives as a good person (or to share theories, philosophies etc.). I kind of have the feeling that Wilde did that as well, or maybe that was a thing around that time too. I'm still learning about our history guys! Though I'm not sure if we'll ever discuss this in class... Probably not. :(

But right now we are all into romance and its intimacy and the same love triangle all over again, mixed with magic and unicorns, that it feels nice to get away from that and read some classics every now and then.

And yes, these classics can contain a hell of a lot of drama, some are even more dramatic (think of Romeo and Juliet), but others were about morals, justice, a critical description on their time and place packed in a funny fictional way and in my opinion that's way more fun and interesting to read. 

I still love my unicorn-magic-and-a-little-bit-of-romance-stuff, but I also love to vary in reading and this book has made me want to dig more into another genre: classics. 

(Is that a genre?)

Overall; this was just a completely different reading experience to me and a great one at that! It's fun to explore some new genres and become more open to different genres, instead pouring yourself into one genre only. It's not a bad thing though, but I just don't enjoy that. And thanks to this classic by Oscar Wilde, I just want to read more and more classics!

That's it for this blogpost!

Until the next blogpost then! :)