Books is My Best Friends

Books is My Best Friends

Growing up I wasn’t like other kids. I didn’t want to play tag at recess, or go over to the neighbor’s house and play their video games. I barely even wanted to run around with the family dog. No, nobody really understood me, but that’s okay because books are my best friends. My best friends.

Books have always been my friends. Every book, every single book in my house and your house and the Library of Congress is my best friend and not yours. They told me. Every book I’ve ever read has said that I’m they’re favorite out of everyone who’s read them, and I tell them all of my secrets and they never tell anyone, especially not Christine. Do the books you read tell you that?

In a way books are like people to me because they are my best friends, but don’t be mistaken. I like books more than people. Books are my escape from the real world. You can do anything you want inside the pages of a book with no consequences. You can be whoever you want, man or woman, adult or child, hero or villain. You can hurt. You can kill. You can kill and nobody will be the wiser inside a book, because books keep secrets like best friends should.

Do you write your friends heartfelt letters every month, chronicling your everyday experiences and thoughts on love? I do. I do that with Pride & Prejudice and 100 Years of Solitude and the entire Goosebumps series. Oh yes, I have quite a diverse group of best friends but they are all my best friends, and they never get jealous and they never spread rumors and they never start dating Jason even though they totally knew you had a crush on him first.

I have best friends that are short and best friends that are long. I have funny best friends and sad best friends and adventurous best friends. I have best friends with gay protagonists and you don’t and that’s really closed-minded of you.

Books are so much my best friends that they’re my family. I have the paperwork here that I found in a book that says I can make my parents not my family. I’m my own family, just me and my books, my real family. Little Women is my mom and Redwall is my dad and my siblings are all of Elena Ferrante’s novels and someday I’m going to marry The Bell Jar and you won’t be invited because you never liked books anyway, not like I do.

Books give me strength. Reading gives me power. I have unlimited power. The books tell me soon I’ll have enough power to make them live, to release them from their paper prisons. It’ll be the books’ world then, and because I’m their best friend they will treat me kindly. You really made a mistake, not befriending books. You’ll be sorry. You’ll see.

For me books are my best friends because I can not imagine my life without reading. Books form my ideas and my character. I like to read both English and Russian novels. Sometimes, when I have some free time I read books in the original. When I want to have some rest I like to read Jack London's Alaskan stories such as "The White Silence," "Call of the Wild," and "Burning Daylight." They are unforgettable. Jack London knew the life of the North perfectly well. He met his characters in real life. He was familiar with their needs and troubles. One of Jack London's best stories is "White Fang." It is a story about the adventures of a wolf, who was tamed by the Indians as a sledge dog, and who little by little perceived the law of life: to eat or to be eaten. Eventually White Fang, but the name of the wolf as well, eventually understood, that love and kindness rule the world. I believe that Jack London loved animals a lot. He has written a lot about them.

But most of all I like to read Russian literature of the last half of the nineteenth century, the literature of the Age of Realism. The writers of the period payed great attention to realistic, detailed descriptions of everyday Russian life. Lev Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoevsky studied universal problems such as morality and the nature of life itself. Although Dostoevski was sometimes drawn into polemical satire, both writers kept the main body of their work above the dominant social and political preoccupations of the 1860s and 1870s. Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" and Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov" have endured as genuine classics because they drew the best from the Russian realistic heritage while focusing on broad human questions. Although Tolstoy continued to write into the twentieth century, he rejected his earlier style and never again reached the level of his greatest works.