Ian Daniel Stewart

That's me. This is my blog.

  • Behold, in awesome majesty, via The Books of My Numberless Dreams, there did come forth, The Book List Meme…Thing: The bolded books are books I’ve read (and even enjoyed), stricken books I will probably never read, italicized books I would like to read, books with crosses are on my shelf and asterisked books I’ve never…

  • 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:…