Confused – 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.

Agatha Christie – Double Sin and Other Studies | Review

Title: Double Sin and Other Studies

Author: Agatha Christie

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 214

Rating 3.75/5

This collection was fun, but at the same time it was confusing because I’d already read at least two of the stories, and possibly more like five or six of them. That’s a problem when there’s only eight stories inside there, but at least they’re good stories, which is why I remembered them in the first place.

It’s because I’ve been collecting every Agatha Christie book that was ever published, and there’s some crossover between books that were published in the UK and in the USA. It confused me, though, because some of the stories also had different names, but then I checked this book against a few others that I own and I saw that even though the names were different, the opening paragraphs were the same.

I still enjoyed reading it though, and I would recommend this to other Agatha Christie fans. It’s also cool because it includes stories about both Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, which gives you a nice healthy little dose of both of them. All in all then, there’s a lot to like here and not much to dislike. Read it.