This month, we’ve read posts about how friends in a story can serve to illuminate plot and the protagonist. We’ve also heard about how critique groups can be inspiring and help us to become better writers. Our friendships, whether with writers or others can help us to overcome personal and health concerns which affect our writing life. But there is one other friendship we must salute – and that’s the reader’s friendship with a book.
Books entertain us, engross us in their characters and worlds. They teach us a little about ourselves, our world, and our relationship to and with each other. Every well-crafted book, as every author knows, requires research and thought not only about character, but about philosophy, technology, politics, clothing, food, and all things most dear and valued.
The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one. – Oliver Goldsmith
A characters’ hardships become our hardships, and their triumphs, disappointments, loves and hates also become ours. We cheer them, we jeer them. We bite our nails with worry and lose sleep over them. We want to visit their worlds, to chat with them, and often we don’t want our journey with them to end. How many people do we know who allow us to know them so intimately?
Through books, we can safely travel into the past without fear about being stomped on or eaten by dinosaurs. We can live on a space station without zero gravity affecting our bodies. We can visit the what-ifs of alternate history or live with hobbits and faeries. Or, we can visit the tender, the romantic, the grieving, the dying parts of our hearts, the very soul of human existence.
Books are our lovers, our mentors, our guides and philosophers. They are our heart break, our inspiration, our voyage into the fantastic, the scary, the parts of ourselves we both desire and dread. They are also the place where we can learn about ourselves, our world, hard science, speculative science, about religions, foods and customs of places we can never visit, or we can learn to cook or fix the plumbing.
Comfort, salvation, or escape from our daily realities can be found in books. Some books help us through our hardest moments when they help us face the hard truths. From this we go forward a little wiser, and a little humbler.
A book, too, can be a star, ‘explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,’ a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe. – Madeleine L’Engle
For all these reasons, every writer makes a pact with the reader when giving a gift of a new friend. That pact is a promise of a lasting friendship borne of captivating characters; a world wherein the reader is so immersed that friendship is undeniable.
And yet, books are odd friends. You can’t yell, at them, I mean, yes you can but they won’t respond or yell back. You can burn them or spill tea on them and they won’t complain or file a complaint of book abuse. They are a one-way friendship, of sorts, whose ideas and words can niggle and torment for days or even years even after the covers have been closed. These hauntings of sorts, can be either the most pleasant or the most tormenting, creating a duelling conversation of voices in our heads.
No matter what his rank or position may be, the lover of books is the richest and the happiest of the children of men. – J.A. Langford
The reason some books can haunt and invade our psyches is because they’ve struck cords of doubt, or love, or longing, or thought and reflection deeply within our own hearts. Thus, every book becomes a special friend to every person who reads it. Every reader brings their own unique world view to the story, their values, understanding of relationships and what is normal, even their own meaning for specific words. No matter the author’s intent, no matter what the author conceived, felt or saw in her imaginings, the reader’s unique perspective changes and twists the author’s world ever so slightly, thus making that book a unique friend.
The book has an unusual power, not only to become one’s best friend, but to also create friendships between people. These friendships occur when readers enjoy and embrace the same book. Irving Stone said it best when he wrote: “There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.”
For all these reasons, there are books we must forever keep on our shelves, despite yellowing pages or dust bunnies proliferating – these books are friends forever.
I have an odd collection of forever-friends-books: a dictionary I used to read when in grade school (that’s my nerdy friend), a biochemistry book from university (the science geek I love); Captain Underpants (need I say more?}, a translated series of books Women’s Voices in Ukrainian Literature (this is everyday history at it’s best); How to do Psychic Readings Through Touch; and the list goes on! The point is, is that these books not only inform, they each play their part in satisfying a need of the heart, a curiosity of the mind and spirit. To ask any one human to be this kind of friend would be an impossible achievement for anyone.
Books are the one freindship writers should never overlook. For many reasons, our words affect how people not only see and interact with their world, but also how they feel. We have a duty, a sacred trust, to be as engrossing, as engaging as we can be in creating spell binding worlds with characters who will stay with the reader long after the covers are closed.