Gosh, I hadn't even hoped you'd stoop to eviscerate it. I see the benefit to human friends at play right there!
I've had too much beer to read this and figure out that title, but I still answered a work email not five minutes ago.
Anyway, being friends with a book is probably just being friends with the impression left by the author or one of the characters of the author. It's probably better to try to become actual friends with that author, unless they are dead or have a restraining order.
Penthouse letters: friends with benefits.
Honestly, Van Halen's "I'll Wait" never seemed like a healthy relationship.
I was never friendly with academic editions of classic texts: too critical.
The cheap covers barely glisten no matter how much you oil them up.
"Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature."
-- Anita Brookner, A Start in Life/The Debut
I would have preferred the sentence "Defiantly, she insists that, while inanimate, they were true friends." to run either "Defiant, she insist ..."
Ah, the subjunctive. Sadly underused these days.
Nosflow make the subjunctive popular again!
Were I to be arsed, I would probably think that a positive development.
"Friendship was once a topic that engaged the great philosophers, from Aristotle to C.S. Lewis"
They also both spent a fair amount of time on justifications for political systems, but Aristotle didn't know enough about lions.
A world in which C.S.Lewis was a great philosopher is very different from the one we live in.
Aristotle is, as near as I can recall, tedious beyond words (excepting the word "tedious"). It's true that a sword fight or two would not help his philosophical arguments in the least, but it would have improved the readability.
Of course, Habermas's refusal to include a talking mouse is why I never managed to finish even a whole chapter of his stuff.
Aristotle was said by his contemporaries to have been a beautiful writer. Unfortunately, we don't have a word of it. What we have is lecture notes, often taken by students.
They probably just wrote what was on the test and left out the talking lion.
16.1: Interesting it didn't survive; whereas IIRC we're thought to have most of Plato.
Ah, the subjunctive. Sadly underused these days.
Ha. Typo. In fairness to me, wonderful me, I got like 3 hours of sleep Monday night.
On topic because Friendship is magic.
(Summary: Married, local, suburban, family-value Republican congressman has affair with married woman half his age.)
16: this is also true of Ferdinand de Saussure, whose major work is actually a collection of his lectures re-edited from other people's notes.