Should-Read: Eve Fairbanks: Can Your Best Friends Be Books?: "I, too, had book friends as a child, and at a time when making real friends could feel like too much to bear... http://lithub.com/can-your-best-friends-be-books/
...When I was 12, I befriended a book called Is Paris Burning? at summer camp.... To escape the soccer kids, I sat at the front of the bus... put my knees up against the pleather back of the driver’s seat so I was in the fetal position, and curled myself around the book as if it was my placenta.... It made me, however, the butt of the real soccer players’ jokes....
What is a friend?... I actually used to put “friendship maintenance” on my daily to-do list along with my laundry and bills, reminding myself to call this friend, to surprise another one with a “random” Kindle gift.... Aristotle... identified... the friendship of utility, the friendship of pleasure, and the friendship of virtue... networking... you both enjoy Zumba, so you make standing dates to do it... a mysterious thing Aristotle called eudaimonia, or roughly, a shared sense of “what it means to flourish as a human”... “singleness of mind.”...
In books, more than in other children, kids can glimpse their first inkling of eudaimonia.... A book friend nurtures the qualities necessary to deep friendship without exposing the vulnerable child to the difficulties inherent in loving another human being.... A book does not make a child work for its affection.... With a book-friend, that “singleness of mind” is magically achieved with an author or a character very different from oneself.... It is that capacity to see our own dreams reflected in others that holds the cities together, as Aristotle wrote. And a book does this all with a gentleness and acceptance and patience impossible for another human being to extend, not to mention another emotionally turbulent child....
Will, who befriended Starship Troopers, is studying to be a doctor; Meir Simchah, who befriended the Torah, has five beloved children and is one of the friendliest people I know. So maybe we don’t need to worry about the bookish children. They are, in fact, in apprenticeship to be people people...
