So what are books good for, besides leveling tables and holding open doors? Reading? Well, not necessarily: I recently had a conversation with Elazar Benyoëtz, a German poet-o-philosopher, about the object called a book. He believes that “people are misunderstanding the function of books; books are not meant, necessarily, to be read”. According to Benyoëtz,…

Wouldn’t you like to pull your favorite book off the shelf, or maybe a cleverly titled one like The Doors of Perception, and have the bookcase slowly swing into the wall to reveal a secret room? I would. If only there was a company on the internet that could do that for me… You know,…

I found myself reading Science-Fiction again for the first time in a long while. Almost every book I read last year was a theology book or a history book and it finally got to be a slog as I approached the end of Roberts’ History of The World. It was just too much fact, fact,…

Rabbi Cary Friedman is a teacher and expert on Torah ethics. He works for the FBI, in the Behavioral Science Unit, as a sort of super-chaplain, to de-stress field agents and others. He also loves Batman comics. So much so he wrote a book, Wisdom from the Batcave, finding, in Batman, a Jewish role model:…

David Foster Wallace could be a master of assuming other personalities for the purposes of writing fiction if it wasn’t for the tendency to coldness he has. The characters and situations in his short fiction can sometimes come across as only an experiment or challenge to himself just to see if he could do it.…