Nathan Bick

I read Crime and Punishment in 2019, before I began my custom of writing book reviews such as this. It surprised me to rediscover this fact, but thereafter I recalled that, several times, I held off from retroactively writing a review with the reasoning that my recollection was insufficient. That’s probably still true, but this time I felt this review’s absence was too conspicuous not to jot down something.  The novel follows its main character Rodion Raskolnikov, a very poor and resentful student. Near the beginning of the story, Raskolnikov is in acute need of money and is planning to visit a pawnbroker, an older woman. As the moment of his transaction draws near, he becomes obsessed with the woman and her wealth, which he views as ill-gotten. He contemplates what he could do with money - he was, after all, an intelligent student with (in his mind) a great understanding of the world and worthwhile ambitions who much more deserved the money. Therefore, Rodion kills the pawnbroker...

  Introduction I began reading The Last of The Mohicans during a time of consolidation for my book collection. I’ll be moving from DC to Boston in two months, and transporting three full bookcases is more than I can justify. So, it fell to me to prune down the collection. Happily, there’s “Little Library” book donation cabinets around DC, including a couple near my apartment, which allowed me to think of my pruning as a “good deed.” Incidentally, it would be fascinating to know who picked up any of my donated books and what value they may have found in them. But I digress. Suffice it to say, I looked across my bookshelves, seeking to identify those books that I would likely never really read or otherwise had no more use for. My eyes fell on a copy of Mohicans that I’d had since childhood, and on account of my enjoyment of the Daniel Day-Lewis film adaptation and my warm memories of watching it with my late father, I decided to pick it up.  I realized that the focus of my readi...

  In my interpretation of this film, it presents statements on two broad categories of meaning: the first being the nature and interaction of two great American “religions”; the second, aspects of the personal human condition.  First, a brief summary. There Will Be Blood is an adaptation of an Upton Sinclair novel about oil, although that is about as much as I know about that novel. The main character, Daniel Plainview (played by Daniel Day-Lewis), is an oil wildcatter in the U.S. Southwest working in the late 1890s through 1920s. He’s an extremely driven but damaged individual, a serious alcoholic. He works with his young adopted son, H.W., an orphan whose father was a colleague of Daniel’s killed in an oil rig accident.  Daniel is told of a very promising oil field in Southern California by a poor resident boy of the area, prompting Daniel to go there and speak with the boy’s family. It is here that we meet one of the other primary characters, the first boy’s identical ...

  Second attempt at reading The Idiot - April 2023 Introduction I picked up The Idiot for the second time in 2023, starting it after I finished The Leopard at the end of January. School started again at the same time, so it took about two months for me to read The Idiot during free moments that I snatched here and there. The first time I read this book, I stopped after about a third of the way in. During that first reading, I couldn’t connect with the content due to its highly dated concerns (19th century wedding schemes and drama) and the antiquated language (in the translation) compared to that of Crime and Punishment , which presented as much more modern and relatable. However, I put down the book knowing that I would return to it later, and that time arrived recently. During discussions with Danette, we discussed the occult mystical concept of the fool archetype. I will expound on this more later in the essay, but this discussion reminded me of The Idiot and helped me realize ...