Nathan Holic

Category: Book Reviews

  • The Reviews Are In…

    I’ll be flying to Chicago tomorrow to say goodbye to a much-loved uncle. I write a great deal about the struggles and difficulties that we face when attempting to be “the right kind of man” in a culture that’s tugging us in a thousand different directions, a thousand different conceptions of manhood, and I should…

  • Infinite Jest: is this about me, or the characters?

    I spent much of the summer reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and regardless of my final thoughts or critical appraisal, the book itself was an experience that succeeded in challenging me as a reader. Along the way, I constantly consulted the web site Infinite Summer, just to measure my reactions against the multitude of…

  • Review – 15 Views Volume II

    There’s a new review of 15 Views Volume II published at The Nervous Breakdown.   Check it out! Here’s an excerpt: The hard work and attention to detail that went into producing 15 Views Volume II: Corridor is uncanny. The narrative is fluid, and eerie silhouette-like papercuts kick off each chapter and add to the…

  • Book Reviews/ Reviewer Reviews

    So…I’ve been writing reviews and critiques for a long time now. Back in 2005 or 2006, I started an account on Shelfari, and wrote a short review of every book that I read. Hundreds of short reviews, most of them trying to look at the book from a writer’s perspective: what could I gain from…

  • Reading Books While Burping My Baby

    I know that it seems that the majority of my postings lately have been about my baby, or about fatherhood, but you know what? When you have kids, you start to view the world through the lens of parenthood. Impossible to get away from that. I can guarantee I’ll never be one of those people…

  • The 9/11 Report

    The 9/11 Report: Graphic Adaptation is a fascinating read, I think, both for what it does well, and for its negatives implications. What does it do well? I think that it proves that graphic novels can tackle nearly any subject, and that the mixed-media approach of art and text can be extremely useful in distilling…

  • Bridge of Sighs

    Richard Russo again explores the decay of small-town life in America, and although he’s done this brilliantly before (Empire Falls, obviously, went over pretty well, right?), I don’t think he’s ever hit us over the head with his ideas on why small towns have failed as he does in Bridge of Sighs. And I still…

  • The Wettest County in the World

    A year or two ago, I published a piece of fiction in The Saranac Review which alternated between traditional text and illustrated comic page. You can actually find a link on my “links” page to my post-publication interview with the editors, where I discuss some of my thoughts on mixed-media literature. The Fiction Editor of…

  • It Can’t Happen Here

    While Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here is remarkably prescient of the events to come in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and the World War II years specifically, and while some of the ideas even transfer well to the early 2000s’ post-9/11 hysteria (the passing of the PATRIOT Act, for instance, and the surrendering…