Please, Professor, let me wake up.

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man disturbs me more than any book I've ever read, and I've read disturbing books before: 1984, Lord of the Flies, The Yacoubian Building, The Bell Jar, Night, Rebecca, The Fortress of Solitude, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Okay, I guess I haven't read too many disturbing novels. But at least I enjoyed the ones I have read.

Invisible Man is a hyper-vivid, hyper-violent, hyper-voluptuous nightmare. It's like a memory that's too real to be true. Like hallucinating responses from ten senses instead of five. Like paranoid psychosis on acid. Like waking up one day and the entire population of the world is torturing you mentally, physically, socially, and spiritually.

I want to stop reading, put the book down, and never pick it up again. I'm not even drawn to it just to find out how it ends; I just want to forget I ever started it. The only reason I keep reading (very slowly, I started reading two months ago, and I'm just now halfway through) is because the stupid book was assigned to me. Reading it makes me sick, makes me loathe humanity.