Nathan Bick

Introduction Demons is about a small provincial town in Russia in the late 1860s or early 1870s. The unnamed town experiences a buildup of conspiracy and suspicion, motivated by the works of a small group of men, until there is an explosion of violent chaos.  As I’ll describe later, the novel’s simple but archetypal plot of revolution is inextricably linked with and expressed through the biographies and squabbles of the characters involved. This will show the reader both that the political and ideological events can be boiled down to personal ambitions and emotions, and also that people can themselves sometimes be boiled down to the ideas which they represent.  Rather than go through a chronological play-by-play of the story’s plot, I primarily describe things character-by-character. Plot and Character Summary The reader learns about the situation in the town only piece-meal and we never in fact learn the name of the town itself. This mysterious backstory is often confusing, e...

Robert Caro’s third book of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Master of the Senate is definitely the greatest of those I’ve read so far. It’s also the most acclaimed, having won both a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Book three suffered very little from the occasional weaknesses of books one and two - that is, nearly every section of Master of the Senate is enthralling, entertaining, and feels necessary. There were stretches in the other books where the narrative got bogged down in the kinds of minutiae that concerned few others than the most diehard LBJ fan or PhD student. Master of the Senate is far more wheat than chaff.  Master of the Senate starts with one of those patented Caro tangents - a history of the Senate as an institution from its inception leading up to Johnson’s entry in 1949. During the drafting of the US Constitution in the late 1780s, the Senate was designed to act as the primary check and balance on the rest of government and the public. The need for this ch...

I’ve found it very challenging to finish my review of Dune , despite finishing the book in April 2024. I think I got a bit too caught up in the Dune mania in my algorithmic bubble - simultaneously watching the second film, rewatching the first film, reading the book, seeing clips on YouTube, talking about it with friends, and more. I’ll offer a few cursory thoughts now, retaining my incomplete full review. Maybe I’ll come back to it when the Dune fatigue has worn off.  The book is really good, although there are some weaknesses, primarily in the action sequences where sequences of events can be sudden and difficult to follow. There are backstory elements which are pretty illogical and cases where characters engage in a silly level of conspiracies, plotting, and preempting each other. The world-building and characters are exceptional. The writing style is unique due to its use of total information for the reader, sapping the book of traditional drivers of suspense like mystery, bu...

Introduction The Red and the Black , a French novel written by Stendhal and published in 1830, is a social and psychological novel, investigating the socioeconomic structure of France and the psychology of its main characters separately and in interaction.  I’ve wanted to read this book for many years. To some extent, the reason I studied French language in school was because my father suggested it in order to read French literature, including Stendhal. He said that he regretted being unable to read in French - I think he may have preferred The Charterhouse of Parma . For some of the time reading this book, I went back and forth between the English translation and the original French. While I noticed that the writing in both French and English are a bit old and formal, the English seemed far more so. I’m not sure if this is due to my greater familiarity with English or due to the quality of the French prose. Either way, the French writing was more clearly beautiful than the English...