The OTHER thing is that, on top of everything else, this also has some of the most gorgeous and visual descriptions i've read in recent memory. Kind of cool that there was very little that could ail you in old times that couldn't be cured by a glass of whiskey at a strip club. the dichotomy between how the intellectual student and the castout are treated by the millionaire.so fascinating. The way the theme of what white people want and expect and reward in Black people here is shown and not told is brilliant.

clear from chapter one that it is going to be brutal and excellent. extremely cool nonsense behavior by me.Ĭlear from the prologue this would be a solid read for me. Love to own a book for 8 years without ever picking it up and then immediately find it compulsively readable from the very first page. If saying you want to read long classics counts as reading them, i'm the smartest girl in the world. It's another PROJECT LONG CLASSIC installment. another several-week period that shall be spent reading it, one chapter at a time, daily.

another paragon of literature added to my currently reading. another impeccable pun combining the title of a seminal work with the month it currently is. The book also gets political when it outlines different possible approaches for racial integration, one more radical than the other.Īll in all a great book, a book which I will probably have to read again (or discuss it with someone!) to understand it better. Of course the main issue is about race and how it was for a person of colour living in a racist society at the time. It’s hard to really summarize this book because so much goes on. And like any coming-of-age story, there is a lot of interior and external conflict. We see the maturing process of the narrator as he goes from being an innocent boy to one who begins to question his identity but can’t seem to reconcile it with his role as a black man in (racist) 1950s America. Due to some events I won’t get into he moves to Harlem to look for work. The book starts off with the narrator attending a college in the American South. I really enjoy coming of age books and this one is no exception. It has taken a second reading for me to truly process the content of this book, and still I can’t exactly say I understand all the symbolism. When I first read the book last year, the above quote really stood out to me. I am invisible because people refuse to see me…When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination- indeed, everything and anything except me.” “I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids- and I might even be said to possess a mind.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison