The Midnight Library x Matt Haig
An unhappy woman gets a second chance to pick a life she would rather be living.
⭐⭐⭐
Fiction
📖 304
This was a quick read about a woman who feels stuck and unhappy in her life, and her journey to understanding what makes a happy life.
The Midnight Library offers a unique interpretation of what happens between life and death, and how decisions and choices create the life we are living. The main character, Nora Seed, gets the chance to sample variations of her life where different decisions were made, resulting in a drastically different life.
“Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes. But I stand by what I said. It was a good choice. It just wasn’t a desired outcome.”
Nora is intensely melancholic, the kind of woman that listens to Chopin’s “Prelude in E Minor,” thinks often about her favorite philosopher Henry David Thoreau, and has a cat named Voltaire.
I didn’t particularly enjoy her character but was able to overlook it because the story itself is so whimsical and light. Even with her darkness, the book was still enjoyable and reveals itself to be full of soulful quotes about the human condition;
“…what we consider to be the most successful route for us to take, actually isn't. Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement - an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary. And we have all these metrics that we try and reach. When really success isn't something you measure, and life isn't a race you can win.”
There were too many references to count (even the movie Jaws gets a special mention). At times I felt it was trying to be relevant and relatable without needing to - there was already so much to connect with through the topic of the book alone.
“It’s like early Cure fused with Frank Ocean via The Carpenters and Tame Impala. Nora tried, and failed, to imagine what that could possibly sound like.”
With its casual reference to Sylvia Plath’s fig tree analogy, I now understand why this book blew up on BookTok, despite not adding anything new to the conversation.
Overall I had such mixed feelings towards The Midnight Library - I enjoyed it but I also felt something was off. It is a challenging topic, one that forces self-reflection (not a bad thing!). At the end of the day, I thought this short read was good, not great, but still worth the time to explore and adventure in new realities.