Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. It was summer homework (aka bullshit) and I wasn’t interested in spending my free time analyzing complex racial themes, nor did I really get it as a fourteen-year-old. I found I appreciated the book waaaaay more in my 20s when I approached it on my own.

That being said, The Road, To Kill A Mockingbird, and The Witch of Blackbird Pond are stuck in my head.

That’s no normal sentence LMAO. Let me translate:

A boy, whose nose was thin—a sign of winter taking its toll, and as stripped of flesh as a dog’s gnawed-on bone would be—crouched by Scrooge’s door to sing him a carol. However, right after he said the first stanza of “God rest ye, merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay—”, Scrooge grabbed his cane so menacingly, the boy immediately fled, leaving his doorstop barren and alone in the heavy fog and even heavier frost.

You could probably understand that just fine. I’ve said the same thing, but language evolves and Dickens is difficult to understand.

Honestly, if it’s going to take you hours to read through and the reading process isn’t fun for you, you may as well watch one of the many movie adaptations out there. It’ll take less time and you’ll get the same/a better amount of understanding. (This isn’t meant as an insult; reading should be enjoyable, and I didn’t find Christmas Carol enjoyable to read, either. The Muppet Christmas Carol is a favorite childhood movie of mine, though.)

It’s over a hundred years old, so the language, conventions, and formatting are over a hundred years old. Not only are some words archaic, but some word usages are archaic – sentence 2 of the whole book says “The flood had made,” where made means to “rise.” I had to look that up as a native English speaker, because my first thought was, “The flood made what, exactly?” No one uses “make” as “rise” anymore.

If you’re not enjoying it, I would skip it, or dedicate yourself to making notes in the margins about more complicated word use. The point it’s making was revolutionary and fair for its day (not many people sympathized with Africa and hated colonialism in 1899), but better and more concise works on the same subject have come up in the time since. You’ll have to make that decision on your own.

“Fiction” is such a broad spectrum that you’re really going to need to be more specific. You could have no interest in a five-book high fantasy series when you want a romance novella, or vice versa.

What kind of fiction have you tried? Why didn’t you like it?