Despite the title, this is actually a novel whose unnamed narrator, a light-skinned African-American of the late 19th/ early 20th century, undergoes various travails including whether to abandon his career as a (black) musician and settle down for a dull life in the (white) middle class. I see Wikipedia suggesting that the author intended it as an ironic reflection on the first-person narratives of the day, so I guess I may not have the full context. It didn’t really work for me as a novel; too many incidents which though interesting in their own right didn’t really add up to a narrative structure. The anonymity of the narrator distanced me further from the story. Still, it’s short.
Top unread non-fiction:
Peleponnesian War | Innocents Abroad | Terre des Hommes | The Hero with a Thousand Faces | Race of a Lifetime / Game Change | Proust and the Squid | The Tipping Point | Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl | Elementary Forms of Religious Life | Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man | History of Christianity | History of the World in 100 Objects | A Room of One’s Own | Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? | The Last Mughal | Reading the Oxford English Dictionary | Jane Austen | Homage to Catalonia | The Road to Middle Earth | Essence of Christianity | The Strangest Man