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CIBooks is Currently Reading

CIBooks is currently reading

Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

bookshelves: e-1914-to-1960s, genre-poc, re-read-sections-of-it, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in August 2026

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CIBooks said: " 7 Quality Rating, 5.5 . Enjoyment Rating

I don't think I've ever found it harder to ‘rate’ a book. I read a lot of black American lit and history and I found this a slog compared to other, more emotionally engaging texts.

An unnamed narrator - who rep 7 Quality Rating, 5.5 . Enjoyment Rating

I don't think I've ever found it harder to ‘rate’ a book. I read a lot of black American lit and history and I found this a slog compared to other, more emotionally engaging texts.

An unnamed narrator - who represents a young Black American Everyman - is forced to leave the bubble of his HBCU and heads north where he becomes involved in a largely peaceful activist group called the Brotherhood.

Overall, I wasn't invested in the main character or the story, but I appreciate what Invisible Man contributed to the conversation on race relations and black activism in 1950s America.

The book contains a few immensely memorable, visceral set pieces, especially the ‘boxing match.’ If I'd read that and nothing else I would have thought Ellison a master. Top notch.

I really enjoyed the beginning of the book, including the inciting incident and the narrator's first few weeks in NYC. Our protagonist - who represents a large segment of the black populace - starts off immensely naive is then disillusioned and enlightened in front of us. He sees the light and Ellison hopes others will too.

But once he moved north, I rarely felt emotionally engaged. The problem with a main character who is almost a blank slate and a symbolic everyman is that he is also no one at all. He lacks identity and personality.

And if you're not gonna give me a deep character dive, you've got to give me some plot and some great supporting characters. Large sections are episodic, with a David Copperfield feel to them. So, we don't get relationship arcs to follow either.

There's just not a lot of there there outside of intellectual points Ellison wants to make, which I personally think could have been made more effectively in an essay or a much tighter version of this story. It could have been 300 pages instead of 560.

But it's impossible for me to imagine reading this in 1952, either as my pale self or as a POC. In the introduction, John F Callahan recounts the impact Invisible Man had on him as a young adult. He'd never come across anything like it before. He saw himself on the page. Skin colour aside, the sheer amount of content I've read - including many texts which build on Ellison's legacy - means individual works have to be the best if the best of the best to hit me the way a book might have as a teen or twenty-something. In what ways this book was groundbreaking are a little lost on me, especially as I think many Harlem Renaissance works broke that ground already.

Sadly, I wouldn't recommend Invisible Man to anyone but dedicated scholars. It took me months to finish as I kept putting it down to read other things. I would recommend some excerpts, including the boxing match and the eviction scenes.

I'd point readers towards other classics like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, If Beale Street Could Talk, Passing, and Beloved as well as more contemporary works like James, Homegoing, The Underground Railroad, Born a Crime, Between the World and Me, and the YA Logan Family Saga, especially Roll of Thunder. ...more "

Aug 26, 2026 05:27AM · see review

CIBooks’s Notes & Highlights

Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson

4 notes & 13 highlights

The Robinson Gorge Bridge was nearly thirty years old, wobbly and terrifying—nobody ever rode the cars across, not even the engineer. The brakeman caught it at the other end.