The Invisible Man

The gist of this one is pretty simple. A man discovers how to make himself invisible, but can't reverse the process. This results in him being super-human and yet still feeling sub-human. It's hard to have any self worth, after all, when you've got no visible "self" to speak of. The titular character slowly becomes detached from society and cynical about his condition for a while before finally just abandoning all pretenses and going into complete criminal mode. It ends more or less how you'd expect it would, but that's alright, since the publication year is 1897 and we need to lower the bar for good writing back then. (It's like baseball. In the same year, Hugh Duffy of the "Boston Beaneaters" led all of professional baseball with eleven home runs.) This is the third H.G. Wells book I've read, and will probably be the last for quite a while; unlike other authors who I've sampled more than once, Wells wrote fifty novels (and easily that many non-fictional works and collections of essays and short stories). So there's simply no way I'll finish his bibliography. That isn't to say I'll never return for more of his fine turn-of-last-century sci-fi, but I think I've now read his three most famous books (this one, The Time Machine, and The War of the Worlds). And while a few of the remaining 47 pique my interest (like The Island of Doctor Moreau, The First Men in the Moon, The War in the Air, and The Shape of Things to Come, to name a few) my primary concern can't be acquiring more books I may enjoy, but instead finishing off the books I already own.