The Midnight Library was Matt Haig’s first book I read, and I think it will be the last. Unfortunately, the book that my book club chose with great expectation was a disappointment for me. Although the subject was beautiful, the writing was so average that I was extremely bored while reading it.
The Midnight Library is a library that contains an infinite number of books and tells the story of Nora, who falls into this library. The books contain Nora’s possible lives and regrets. When Nora opens a book and starts reading it, she goes to that life and starts experiencing one of the things she regrets not doing there. In one of them she gets married, the other she becomes a well-known athlete, in another, she lives a quiet life. And it goes on and on.
While it might be an excellent “feel-good” book, it became one of the books I forgot immediately with the author’s cheap life lessons and the predictable ending from the very beginning. The main character, Nora, was so two-dimensional that I didn’t care about her or her lives at all. And so I forced myself to finish it for the sake of my book club. It is not a book I can recommend wholeheartedly, but if you’re looking for something short and easy to read, maybe you will like it.
The Midnight Library
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?
In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig’s enchanting novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one. Following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist. She must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life. And what makes it worth living in the first place.
Matt Haig
Matt Haig is an English novelist and journalist. He has written both fiction and non-fiction for children and adults, often in the speculative fiction genre.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
2 Comments
I get very upset when great stories fall into the hands of average writing :/
I know! Very disappointing. :/