The Midnight Library

i'm done with forcing myself to finish books even when i have no interest in them. this just did not do it for me. my expectations weren't particularly high but i didn't think it would bore me like that. i think the concept is just not for me. i couldn't get attached to the character like i guess i was supposed to. i tend to think that when i start a book i have to finish it but i realised that reading should be fun first of all and i shouldn't force myself to continue reading something i don't like! so here are my reasons. 

Thank you. If I could tell the author anything, it would be ‘Thank you'.
I used to be an avid reader and I have not finished a book in over ten year. But yesterday a friend handed me this book and said, ‘I think you would like this'.
And I bought it because I wanted to be the kind of person that still buys books for joy, that still reads them.
And I did. I sat down and I got drawn in and I kept coming back to it. And I fell a little bit in love with reading it.
I cried reading this story - from joy, from sadness, because sometimes it just aches to finally have words giving name to something previously intangible.
It's a beautiful way to remember how very revolutionary, how fulfilling, it is to live.

I loved this book!

Who doesn't have some regrets..? I think all of us have them, some can deal with them for others it is the biggest issue, and it can consume them to the point of no return. This is basically what happens to our MC. She is so obsessed with her life not being the best version that she ends up dead. In her in-between stage, she is invited to see alternative versions of her life.

This was a great read. I understand why people will not like it but for me, it was on point! I loved her exploring the different perspectives and understand better life and how important is to live.

“The thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory.”

Unlike last few years, January was a really slow reading month for me despite starting with this good novel.
Midnight library is about should have, would have, could have, it's about regrets of the protagonist, how her decision impacted her life and things would have been different she would have chosen different paths and then after a point she actually gets to live different lives where she if chose a different path.

This book can give you hope if you are stuck with regrets and can give you a new perspective.

This was such a shallow, predictable and pretentious read. I almost threw up a little on some pages.

The book is about somebody who wants to commit suicide and gets a chance to get av view in her parallel lives.

The women in question, is very smart and loves philosophy. She has a quote for everything and knows practically every obscure fact ever scientifically proven. Furthermore she is a musical genius and she has (despite being an absolute amazing person) no friends except for one person at the other side of the world. Im thinking I heard all the clichés at this point.

Instead of actually going into some of the core issues that lead to the suicide and the real angst, the book dances around some predictable mini stories of which most are just plain boring. She becomes a loved rock star, she becomes a scientist, she wins a gold medal (laughing out loud at this point). Only to realize, she has been living life wrong this whole time !

After she has visited a lot of lives, sometimes feels quite untrue. Furthermore, she has concluded there is no life in which she is fully content. Without a proper solution for her former problems, she wakes up and decides she wants to live. Ain't that confusing!

The book is written in such a childish manner. Nora's personality is based around some small, but very specific topics, on which the book constantly hammers and the author manages to include the topics in every conversations. The author clearly wanted this girl to like philosophy.

You can imply these things, but this just felt really shallow. This book felt fake at times, felt like a parody. I wouldn't pick it up again.

A quick read – but overall an enjoyable novel with a nice message. The beginning of the book, after what I'd call the “introduction” (being vague to avoid spoilers), starts a bit weak; as it portrayed some themes that felt more bleak than expected. Once you get through that section, I found it rounded itself out by the end to a comfortable ending.

Opting for 3 stars instead of 4 stars as I found the direction the book was headed to be pretty obvious maybe 40% of the way into the book. This wasn't a major flaw, but still pulls back some of the tension and wonder when you realize what's happening and how it's going to end so early.

Trigger warnings: Suicide ideation, depression, drug use, drug overdose, toxic relationships, parental deaths

So I'm rather in two minds about this one. On one hand, I appreciated the underlying message of this book and it did make me pretty emotional at the end, but on the other, I couldn't completely get rid of this tiny feeling at the back of my head that some parts of the premise were a little too simplified and too convenient. It's hard to discuss more about that without some pretty big spoilers, so I'll be hiding all of my plot-related thoughts behind spoiler tags.

On a non-spoilery note, the writing was very pleasant and fairly light. It read very smoothly and easily, and I found myself breezing through the book. I'm reading this with an online book club, and some of us complained that there weren't chapter numbers which made it difficult to post our thoughts, but perhaps that is a problem unique to being in an online book club. There were also some chapters that was just one or two pages long, sometimes even just one sentence long. Even after finishing the book, I was never really sure if there was an impactful enough point to this strange chapter structuring. I could probably come up with some fluffy reason for it but I don't know if it was really justified by anything we actually read in the book, and I'd feel like I'm making excuses for Haig.

Nevertheless though, I do feel like Haig might have had personal experiences with the mental health issues dealt with in this book, or at least have been close to people who did. There is a sort of intimacy in the way he describes and depicts depression and even suicide ideation. If this is in any way triggering to you, I'd recommend staying away from this book all together as it is a major theme that the whole plot revolves around.

Now for the spoilery bits. I think I first sat up and paid attention when Nora met Hugo in her Arctic glaciologist life. To know that there were other people out there sliding between lives as well was something I hadn't expected to happen in this book, and I was wondering whether they'd go anywhere with it. I guess perhaps one could argue that the point of Hugo being there was to show how we could easily get lost flicking through possibilities instead of focusing on living the one life we have, but I feel like that point could've been driven home a bit more. The character of Hugo, ironically, felt like a huge potential that was missed. Another thing that kept coming back to me was wondering whether it was deterministic to say that this or that person might've still ended up the same way in these other lives. For example, Dan. Will he always be an asshole in every version of Nora's life? If he is, why is that? Nora can only access lives that branch out from a decision she has made differently at some point in her life, but I feel like what this book didn't (or maybe couldn't) talk about was how in any and every version of our lives, it's just as much influenced by other people's decisions that directly or indirectly impact us. Nora may have chosen to get married to Dan, but Dan also chose to be an asshole. Nora may have chosen to focus on swimming but multiple people made decisions that became stepping stones on her journey to becoming an Olympic swimmer, like perhaps a teacher who decided to give her time off to attend swim training, or a coach who decided to properly focus on her strengths instead of another athlete's. Just as Nora's decisions impacted others (having her brother Joe become her manager, or dying of drug overdose), other people's decisions impacted her too, so I couldn't completely buy into the idea of - “if I had chosen swimming, this is the one and only version of my life that could have happened” or “if I had given up teaching music, this kid Leo would 100% certainly have ended up as a juvenile delinquent”. I think this thought kept recurring to me while reading this book and I kept constantly wondering whether the book was going to resolve it but apparently it didn't.

Overall though, this was a pretty feel-good book that still raised a lot of thought-provoking points, provided that you are OK with the trigger warnings.

I'm unsure whether or not to approach this book as a “Young Adult” novel and whether or not that should change how I view it, but as it stands, I'll be viewing this book the same way I would any other. My hope for this is that a teen or young person who's contemplating any form of self-harm picked this book up, read it, maybe got something from it, decided against self-harm, then read literally any of the many pieces of literature Haig pretentiously references in this book, realizes how much better that piece of literature was than this crap, and regains a wonderful outlook on life realizing there are so many better books to read than this.

This was so horribly written I'm really wondering if he had a page count he needed to reach or something. A 288 page book has never taken me under a week to read, and it really is because this writing is so overly simplistic, the characters so uninteresting, the narrative style so redundant that a 10 year old could read this in the same time I did. I have no idea how this book has so much acclaim, there's so much wrong with this book, and since it's been a long time since I read something I really didn't like, I'll even break it down!

This is some of the worst writing I've encountered, so many moments in this novel where it actually feels like Haig is breaking the fourth wall to tell the reader something, there is little that the characters or setting do to help the reader infer any further meaning, rather Haig simply has Nora say philosophical (a word that sounds so trite now after reading this book sadly) mumbo-jumbo to account for that he just doesn't know how to portray her grasping deeper meaning, and in turn help the reader to become Nora and share her journey. Pair that with a plot line that on the surface should be engaging, but handled by Haig becomes incredibly repetitive (Reading about Nora constantly asking people in her various lives what's happening or pretending to not be alien to the timeline was so grating that it distracts from the point he's trying to make, which he of course then compensates for by directly spoon feeding the reader what he's trying to say.) And speaking of repetitive, he seriously repeats himself so much in this book, Nora explains her cat's name/nickname multiple times, he uses the same Thoreau quote I think 3 times, and to read him continuously name drop philosophical authors over and over induces a headache in me as I think about it. There is also SO much empty space in this book lmao, like seriously he had to have had a page count he wanted to hit because I've never encountered a book that felt so lazy. There's seriously a page that's just four lines in a song he already dedicated a chapter to earlier, that I wish I didn't have to read again. All this not even to mention the ending of the book can be inferred maybe 30 pages into the novel, and makes the inane journey that proceeds even more cringingly annoying.

I would also like to say, since he references The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath at least 3 times in this book, (The Plath quote that begins the book, Nora seriously explains a major analogy from the Bell Jar that no doubt inspired this book, and later Nora just straight up has a copy of it in one of her realities.) Please if anyone reads this review please go just read that book instead of this. Haig basically wants you to do the same, he pretty much overtly tells you this in the book with how overt he is in saying he just got the idea for this book from Bell Jar. Seriously it's a much better book and is much more insightful than this drivel.

At the end of the day however, this book was refreshing because it helped me realize that the more challenging books I've been reading are very much worth it. I was also wondering if I'm struggling with perhaps reading comprehension or something since I was finding it hard to truly lock into more challenging stuff like To The Lighthouse, but no, that's simply an intricately written novel, while this is a 45 year old British guy who spends 288 pages poorly disguised as a 35 year old woman named Nora Seed just to tell you he knows the names of a lot of philosophers and you probably shouldn't kill yourself.

Oh my goodness, this book! I listened to this book on audio because my life is a little crazy this week with limited time to sit and read. I enjoyed the narration a lot. This book was picked by a member of The Bibliovert Podcast's Sisterhood of the Traveling Books group. This book moved me and really hit me in the feels! The titles of the chapters were intriguing and definitely kept me engaged wanting to listen for an explanation. The storyline is really interesting and unique. I went into this book completely blind and I'm so glad I did! There are so many lessons to take away from this book. There are an innumerable amount of possibilities in life and one choice can change or effect those. There's a lot of talk about dwelling on regrets and questioning what the true definition of success is. There's lots of triggers in this book especially regarding suicidal ideation so definitely check the warnings. This book follows Nora and her journey through the Midnight Library which I can't explain without spoiling.I really loved this book and found Nora relatable. I took off one star because I really would have liked an epilogue or a little more closure as to where Nora's life goes.
18+ for themes

I feel so at peace after reading this book.
I think I might be a little overwhelmed with feelings now, so a coherent review will follow later.

Matt Haig is so good at writing and describing mental illnesses and mental health. He never fails to touch me with his writing.
The setting of the story also is so magical and so thought-through. Just the concept of this whole book is been written down so well.
This book talks about regrets, grief, love, friendship,... in such a wonderful way. I loved going on this quest with Nora Seed.

This is definitely one of my favorite books of 2020.

This may have been my favorite book of the year.

Suicide themes make me nervous in books. This book handles it without glorifying it or downplaying it. Honestly, suicide makes me angry, but again credit to the author for writing a description of why some people make this choice. Depression, anxiety, and other emotions are all real and they affect people in many ways. Remember that you are loved, you make a difference, and no matter how bad it is; someone wants to help.

The happily ever after at the end is a little much. Emotions and attacks don't just go away, but there is some healing when the realization that you matter sticks. Well done!