The Midnight Library: A Novel
by Matt Haig, 2020, Kindle Version, Viking
This was an interesting book for me. It’s about a young woman whose life is a mess, so she attempts to end it by taking some pills. She didn’t, however, take enough and ended up in a state somewhere between life and death and she arrives in a library full of books. The librarian is a woman who was the librarian of her school library when she was a kid.
The books in the library are books that provide her with lives that she could have lived had she made other choices. There is also a book of regrets which is rather large because she basically regrets all the choices she made in her life.
She then experiences other lives, but they don’t seem to work out very well and she is returned to the library when she discovers that the alternate choice isn’t providing the happiness she thought it would.
The books is well written but bogs down a bit when it describes a large number of lives. Most individuals make a very few life-changing choices and I think it would have been better to explore a few of these lives in greater depth than flit between a larger number. At one point, the author said she had experienced thousands of alternative lives.
It did cause me to go back and think about the choices I had made in my life. Just about all of those choices turned out well for me so I don’t have much to regret in that vein. I do have other regrets, however, that I wish I could have a second change, but there’s no guarantee that I would do any better the second time around so it’s better for me to focus on the present and future.
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