First Reading Response

I want now to pause and reflect on the start of my novel. At the beginning I found the novel was a little hard to wrap myself around, you know when you want so bad to read a book but you just cannot retain the information, that was me for the first few chapters (good news, I did very much get into it, after the beginning), I think because I had expected it to be different than it was.  The first page is an elaborate description of the scenery, which, to its avail, painted a vivid picture of the surroundings , but I didn't find it gripping enough to be drawn in straight away, although I am a tad biased as I cannot relate to the time period as well as I would like to (hopefully in the near future). One thing that I did like was the complex personalities of the three men, Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward, and Harry Henry. Dorian seems to be, at first a perfect specimen, to hold beauty beyond comparison, to be so alluring and captivating that he garners the attention of both Hallward and Henry. Basil seems to be more closed off than the two others, an artist, who is meticulous when working, "who puts all his personality into his art so he has none left for himself" as Harry describes him. Henry seems to be an open book, with his opinions laid out on the table for everyone to see, you get the feeling that he is full of himself but you like him all the more for it. I am hoping that the characters inner aspects be shown by the end of the books.