🌸 May Book Club Pick: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

This May, as everything around us begins to bloom, we're reading a novel that asks what happens when beauty never fades—but the soul does. The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s only novel, and it’s just as elegant, provocative, and sharply witty as you’d expect from the master of aestheticism.

Set in the glittering, decadent world of Victorian London, the story follows the charming and impressionable Dorian Gray, who becomes obsessed with youth and beauty after having his portrait painted. When he wishes that he could remain young forever—while the painting ages in his place—his life begins to spiral into a dark exploration of vanity, hedonism, and moral decay.

Though brief in length, the novel is packed with dazzling one-liners, complex ideas, and a haunting sense of the price we pay for pleasure without consequence. It’s a gothic classic with mythological echoes (think Faust, Narcissus, and Icarus), and it makes for lively discussion: How much do art and influence shape us? Is beauty inherently dangerous? And what would you do if you could stay young forever?

Wilde’s vision is both a love letter to art and a cautionary tale—and it feels surprisingly modern over a century later. A perfect match for a spring month where everything seems lovely on the outside... but not all is as it seems beneath the surface.