Bored – DaneCobain.com

Title: Invisible Man

Author: Ralph Ellison

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 478

Rating: 3/5

Okay, first thing’s first – don’t get this confused with the H. G. Wells novel, as apparently some people do. There was no chance of that here because I’ve already read the Wells novel and I’ve also already come across Ralph Ellison, and so I’d been looking forward to getting to this one.

Unfortunately, I just didn’t really engage with it. It’s not as though there’s anything wrong with it, although it’s perhaps a tad overwritten here and there and it’s definitely way longer than it really needed to be. It gets its point across, but it gets its point across pretty early and then just keeps on reinforcing it.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate this book for what it is, and it was definitely an important milestone in modern literature, especially in America. It does a great job of portraying the African American experience and shining a light on it from a different angle. It’s just that it isn’t particularly accessible, especially to a modern reader. Or maybe that’s just because I’m a white British dude.

I suppose I was just hoping for something like To Kill a Mockingbird, and while this does cover a lot of similar societal issues, this leans too heavily on the message and doesn’t leave the reader any room to arrive at their own interpretation. It’s sort of clunkily done, and it doesn’t have the engaging core story line that Harper Lee had.

And here we arrive at my biggest problem with this book, and that’s that I just don’t have anything else to say about it. This poses a challenge, because each of my reviews has the same word count as the book has pages, and so I’m going to have to bulk this one out a bit. Sorry about that – but on the plus side, we only have 150 words to go.

I think what it all comes down to is that I had high expectations for this one and then it just didn’t quite deliver. It’s one of those contemporary modern classics that I’ve heard a lot about, and I’d been feeling bad because I hadn’t got to it. Then I picked it up and felt glad that I’d left it as long as I did.

So it’s not that it isn’t worth reading, it’s just that it’s definitely not for everyone and it also feels like a product of its time. If you can get over that then I’m sure that you’re in for a lovely old time, but it just wasn’t for me. It failed to grab my attention from the outset, and even if it had managed to redeem itself, I would have got bored again anyway. So maybe skip this one unless you have to study it.

Learn more about Invisible Man.

Good Housekeeping – Step-by-Step Vegetarian Cookbook | Review

Title: Step-by-Step Vegetarian Cookbook

Author: Good Housekeeping

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 305

Rating 2/5

The low rating on this one is partly my own fault because I’m a vegan and not a vegetarian. Still, I saw this at a car boot sale going for peanuts, so I thought I’d pick it up anyway in the hope that I could veganise most of the recipes.

I didn’t end up doing that, but not because it wasn’t possible. It was more that there were very few recipes inside this book that actually took my fancy, and I think there were only a dozen or so that I ended up trying from the hundreds that were included here. Even fewer actually made their way into regular rotation in my recipe collection.

Part of that was down to the pictures, which weren’t particularly appealing, and part of it was down to the recipes, which kind of veered between too much hassle and overly simple. A lot of them just didn’t appeal to me as well, including a whole section on soups. I tried a few of them, but I pretty quickly got bored and realised that the soup recipes just weren’t going to be for me.

Ultimately, this book is better as a display book than as an actual reference book, and if you’re looking to cook something nice for a vegan or a vegetarian, you’re better off just Googling it and following a recipe that you find online, especially if you can get a video recipe. Otherwise, there’s not much point picking this up unless you can get it super cheap, like I did. It’s just okay for what it is, and maybe not even that. Go ahead and make of that what you will – and bon appetite, my friends.