6 Things You Can Do With Books that You Can’t Do With Your Besties

We all love our best friends. They’re our shoulders to cry on, they’re our partners in crime, they’re our study buddies—and they’re there when we need to procrastinate, too. But even the best of friends can’t be with us for us every minute of the day—unlike a book. Books are always there for us. Sure, a conversation with a book is pretty one-sided—the book (usually) does most of the talking. And a book can’t keep you company over coffee or hold your hand when you’re scared. But a book will stay up all night with you, and it’ll never be too busy or distracted when you need it. Here are a few more things you can do with books that you can’t always do with your best friends.
Hear a Stranger’s Secrets
Sometimes, no matter how close we are with our friends, we have secrets we’re not quite ready to spill—and vice versa. But books aren’t like that—they exist entirely to share their characters’ secrets with us. True, some books may take a while to share their big reveal, and others might trick us with unexpected twists and turns. Some even make us read two, three, seven books before the truth is revealed—but in the end, books almost always give up their secrets. And, unlike some friends, they don’t expect us to reciprocate by sharing our secrets back.
Visit Foreign Lands for mere dollars
Most of us have occasional—if not constant—bouts of wanderlust. We want to explore the Galapagos islands or tour the ruins of ancient Rome, and we really want our best friends at our side when we do it. But international flights and hotels are expensive, luggage is heavy, and learning another language can take years. Many of us don’t get to actually indulge our wanderlust with actual trips. Lucky for us, we can go on journeys without leaving the comfort of our homes (or even our beds) by reading: visit Amsterdam with Hazel and Augustus in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars; sneak off to Hawaii with Maddy and Ollie in Everything, Everything, by Nicola Yoon. You can even get stuck at the airport with Hadley Sullivan in The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, by Jennifer E. Smith.
Experience an Alternate Reality
Sometimes all that wanderlust makes us wish we could travel to places that aren’t actually real—books are especially handy for that kind of travel. You can see an alternate Oxford University in The Golden Compass, or visit the magical back alleys of Prague with Karou in Daughter of Smoke and Bone. Of course, not all of the alternate realities books have to offer aren’t always pleasant. You can spend time in a dystopic (and terrifying) America in The Hunger Games with its corrupt government, or dive into Divergent, set in a futuristic Chicago where citizens are divided into personality-drive factions. Lucky for us readers, a particularly nice thing about traveling by book is how easily we can get back home—just close the pages (or shut down your device).
Be a Bad Friend, Consequence-free
Another thing about books that is not true of best friends: they won’t get mad at us if we don’t get back to them when we promised we would. Have you ever stopped in the middle of a text conversation with a friend to eat dinner, or study, or watch TV—only to discover when you pick up the conversation a few hours later that your BFF is angry you didn’t get back to her sooner? Fortunately, books are different. If you want to read a book slowly, just one or two pages a day—books are okay with that. If you want to breeze through at a record pace, finishing three hundred pages in a day or two—books are okay with that. If you want to start one book, set it aside to read another, and then get back to the first book weeks later? Books are okay with that.  Personally, when a new book from one of my favorite authors is published, I’m never sure if I’ll read it right away or if I’ll save it for a rainy day.
Travel Through Time
How many of us have dreamed of living in Elizabethan England or ancient Greece? No matter where we might travel with our best friends, it’ll always be in the here and now.  (Unless your BFF is the Doctor.) But for now, books may be the closest thing we have to time travel. Visit 1890s New York and solve a mystery in These Shallow Graves, by Jennifer Donnelly. Go back to the 1970s in Rebecca Stead’s Newbery Award winner When You Reach Me. Or, you can take things even further and travel through time to an alternate reality, like 1950s Germany in Wolf by Wolf by Ryan Graudin. This book doesn’t just travel through time, but imagines a different history—one in which Germany won the second World War, and a seventeen-year-old girl named Yael is working with the resistance to overthrow Hitler’s regime.
Fall in Love, No Strings Attached
Sometimes best friends fall in love in real life, and it can be wonderful, but it can also get pretty fraught: What does this mean for our friendship? If it doesn’t work out, can we still be friends?  Who gets to keep the rest of our squad if we break up?  Luckily, falling in love with a character in a book is pretty much risk-free. I mean, were there any hurt feelings after you read Twilight—falling in love with Edward first, then dropping him to join team Jacob instead, only to drop them both when you finally got around to reading Pride and Prejudice and fell head over heels for Mr. Darcy? No hard feelings accompanied any of these changes of heart and none of your friendships were the worse for wear. (Except with that one friend who preferred Mr. Wickham. But her taste is obviously questionable.)
Of course, at the end of the day, books can’t replace of our best friends—there’s a reason we call them the best, after all.  Still, it’s nice to know books will be there for us no matter what, always ready to tell us their secrets, take us on another adventure, and tug at our heartstrings.