{"id":18388,"date":"2016-04-15T08:00:03","date_gmt":"2016-04-15T12:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=18388"},"modified":"2016-04-15T08:00:03","modified_gmt":"2016-04-15T12:00:03","slug":"books-that-are-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=18388","title":{"rendered":"Books That Are Friends"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, I had the great pleasure of hearing editor Neal Porter share some of the picture books he has published over the past few years, along with some upcoming treats (School’s First Day of School<\/a><\/em> by Adam Rex and Christian Robinson is brilliant and endearing! Best Frints in the Whole Univers<\/em>e<\/a> by Antoinette Portis is such silly fun – you can’t NOT read it out loud! Yuyi Morales’ Rudas: Ni\u00f1o’s Horrendous Hermanitas<\/a><\/em>\u00a0is hilarious and visually mesmerizing!).
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\nAmong\u00a0his stack of books were so many of my own personal favorites. Special, special books like Julie Fogliano and Erin Stead’s\u00a0If You Want to See a Whale<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0And Then It’s\u00a0Spring<\/a><\/em>, Philip C. Stead and Matthew Cordell’s Special Delivery<\/a><\/em>, Philip C. Stead and Erin Stead’s A Sick Day for Amos McGee<\/a><\/em>, Jason Chin’s Redwoods<\/em><\/a> and Island<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s Bully<\/a><\/em> and Green<\/a><\/em>. These books are like friends you want to visit and revisit.
\n\"\"<\/a>And then he brought out\u00a0The Iridescence of Birds<\/a><\/em> by Patricia MacLachlan and Hadley Hooper. That book! It’s been my\u00a0friend since I first saw it in a sales meeting. I can’t be near it without wanting to give it a pat or a hug. It’s such a thoroughly friendly book, for a beautiful book. I don’t know exactly why it is so very close to my heart; perhaps\u00a0it’s the perfection of language, the delicious color palette, the friendly faces, the warm evocation of a gentle, lively, artistic childhood. My 52-year-old heart feels a six-year-old’s happy wonder looking at\u00a0that book, and my reaction makes me appreciate\u00a0all over again how much children need book friends.
\nBook friends stay with us forever. Ferdinand is still my friend. Frances and Sal are my friends. The little bear cub is also my friend.\u00a0<\/i>Peter is my friend, along with his melted snowball. Max himself\u00a0wasn’t exactly my friend\u00a0as much as\u00a0those monsters were, and the boat, and the jungly trees. Corduroy has always been my friend, and Ping. Eloise was a\u00a0quirky and slightly alarming\u00a0friend, but I admired her sassiness, boundless energy, and\u00a0theatrics; Skipperdee and Wink were my friends. I also counted as a friend the dotted oversized bear-dog-mystery creature from Put Me in the Zoo<\/em>. I’ve had so many, many book friends.
\nI realize this is starting to sound weird, a little infantile, and it isn’t that at all. I had real friends, too, of course, the giggly human kind,\u00a0who told\u00a0secrets and concocted weird\u00a0snacks and shared their own best book friends with me.\u00a0I can’t imagine how impoverished a child’s life is without books, without those marvelous, unexpected extra friends who travel life’s bumpy path with us and make us laugh, care, and discover\u00a0ourselves and each other along the way. I’m so grateful to the many organizations whose mission it is to get those book friends into the hands of kids everywhere.
\nI also love that one person’s best book friend is another person’s “meh.” Book friendships are as fierce and personal as real friendships.
\nReaders, what books feel like friends to you?
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some books have an extra something. It’s not just the characters, but the books themselves, that grab our hearts forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18388\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}