Vegan With A Vengeance is an awesome book, BUT not for a novice cook in my opinion. Isa (the author) uses a lot of things like tempeh, quinoa hijiki, and edamame that I don't think a lot of people are familiar with and which can be hard to find.
I think of all my cookbooks this one is the most user friendly:
125 Best Vegan Recipes
It uses common ingredients and most recipes are fairly simple.
There a couple of recipes for stuff like Sloppy Joes which is just a regular recipe for Sloppy Joes only using "soy ground meat alternative". Yeah. I don't think I needed to buy a book to figure that out. But most recipes are a little more inspired.
Having said that, this is a
recipe for a salad that rocks but which had fake chicken on it. It would be just as good without.