The amazing, eerie sense that someone else is just “on your wavelength"

September 2, 2017 11:33 PM

Can your best friends be books?
posted by invisible ink (16 comments total)

I loved this. Thank you.
posted by CMcG at 12:03 AM on September 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'll never forget when Great Expectations bailed me out of prison when I punched that guy for grabbing Pride and Prejudice by the blurb.

A book will not tell him it has become a Ghostbuster and snap shut its covers. Its love is unconditional.

That's not friendship, that's hostage taking. If we want to personify books, well, what if the book doesn't like you?

I really love literature, but in a fleeing a burning building scenario, I'm grabbing the things that are breathing to take with me.

Starship Troopers owes me twenty bucks
posted by adept256 at 1:03 AM on September 3, 2017 [6 favorites]

I don't remember me having written this essay... oh wait.

(Seriously, I'm not the MeFi's own. I now have a massive brain-crush on this author, Eve Fairbanks.)

I grew up in considerable isolatin in an emotionally unpredictable, negligent, and turbulent family, and to this day I have extremely poor social support. But books have been my soundboard. They help me acknowledge my having a condition -- in the sense of human condition instead of medical condition.

Isn't also that true with great friendships? For friendships to exist there must be a kind of resonance, which need not and cannot be constantly present, but is possible.
posted by runcifex at 2:20 AM on September 3, 2017 [7 favorites]

I don't think the author has considered that she doesn't know book-frienders who are loners because they are loners.
posted by betweenthebars at 3:56 AM on September 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
– Groucho Marx
posted by Phssthpok at 4:43 AM on September 3, 2017 [5 favorites]

Or a drug. That stack of books, my best friends, keeps me sane, keeps me going when I can't get out the door or out of bed or that warm corner curled up with tea and a cheesy SF novel. Killing me, literally, get out and walk, walk for life, exercise, run, jog, bike, to the library for more and more books!
posted by sammyo at 7:13 AM on September 3, 2017

This was a really good article about more than just books and how we feel about them, it excellently unpacks a lot of things related to the nature of friendship itself. Thanks for posting.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 7:19 AM on September 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

I can remember where and when I read many books, and thus many things that were going on that had nothing to do with whatever the book was, although I like to think they were all good books. Meaning, the act of reading, and making a habit of reading, seems to be something larger than the book itself.
posted by lagomorphius at 8:48 AM on September 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

My apartment is crowded with 3600 friends and acquaintances. About 10 years ago I had a real friend experience reading Casanova's autobiography. It's a very long read, six thick volumes. But during that read I felt as if I was with this person in a very real way though he's been dead a very long time. The book is not a long list of sex escapades. If that's all you know of the man you need to do some reading yourself. He led a long and extremely varied life. And there were times when I argued with the man about what he was doing as well as times when I went along for the exciting ride through Europe in the 1700's.

To be able to experience another person across so much real distance of space and time is only possible to me through books. Books are where immortality lies. There are people here in my apartment that died over 2000 years ago, yet I can just get up, pull a book off the crowded shelfs and there they are alive once more.

Thanks for this article.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:49 AM on September 3, 2017 [8 favorites]

I love this.

I also made enemies with books as a kid. I can remember throwing several across the room when they didn't end like I wanted and I felt so betrayed.
posted by ilovewinter at 9:09 AM on September 3, 2017 [5 favorites]

This reminds me of how I felt about the royal families of ancient Egypt when I was little. I didn't imagine myself in some kind of time-portal fantasy friendship, but I thoroughly believed that I got them, and I carried around my books about Egypt everywhere when I was feeling down. I wanted to be able to look at their faces, either in art or in the crumbling flesh. When I became particularly obsessed with the Amarna period at about 11 or so, I imagined entire worlds of motivation and experience for them.

Just looking at the page of a particular book on the topic, the way a sentence broke across lines, could comfort me. Around this time I had a habit of pressing and crinkling the paper into my thumbs that was enormously reassuring somehow, and also enormously damaging to the paper. I was scolded for it, but I didn't have the words to explain that I wasn't being careless, my thumb just ... fit there, somehow. I also liked scraping pins across the paper. Now that I think about it again, I might have been stimming, if you can say that about a child not on the spectrum.

Although I was a lonely child, I am grateful now that I did not know anyone quite like me at the time, because then I would probably have learned that a smart kid getting into ancient Egypt is super, super basic and not at all special. I don't like to lament the internet as much as some, but when you don't have it, you get to be alone with your thoughts about a book -- for worse, and sometimes for better.
posted by Countess Elena at 10:40 AM on September 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

I'm a librarian. I get to hand children potential friends all day long. It's a great responsibility.
posted by Biblio at 2:12 PM on September 3, 2017 [11 favorites]

I'm a librarian. I get to hand children potential friends all day long. It's a great responsibility.

Indeed.

As a kid I was browsing the children's section at our local public library and was approached by one of the librarians. She asked me if I was looking for anything in particular and I just sort of shrugged. I think I mentioned that we were taking a long car trip, and wanted lots of stuff to read.

She proceeded to hand me all of the Daniel Pinkwater titles they had on hand. I walked away with this armload of his stuff and spent that summer vacation in the company of books I still count as friends.

It's like she instinctively knew that this shy bullied kid would take to Pinkwater's writing - populated by characters who were misfit kids - like a duck to water.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:35 PM on September 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

That was a lovely essay. Thanks so much for bringing it to my attention.
posted by old_growler at 7:09 PM on September 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

I have so many best friends in books. I should catch up with them more often.
posted by kaltsuro at 9:24 PM on September 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

"The love of books
is for children
who glimpse in them

a life to come, but
I have come
to that life and

feel uneasy
with the love of books.
This is my life,

time islanded
in poems of dwindled time.
There is no other world."

--Robert Hass, from "Songs to Survive the Summer"
posted by informavore at 3:42 AM on September 10, 2017 [2 favorites]