The Midnight Library

 Sometimes a book enters your life not because you seek it out, but because some cosmological force made it seek you out.    I have been going through a major career/life crisis over the past few months.  With this crisis has come a lot of regrets.  Regrets about not studying hard enough.  About not being happy enough.  About not being brave enough.  About not having things figured out.  About roughly anything that could possibly come to mind.  One thing that I have never regretted is my love of reading.  Reading has always been a form of escape for me.  It's why fantasy and sci-fi are my favorite genres.  It is so easy to escape into the world of a good fantasy or sci-fi novel and experience a life with no regrets.  But life isn't about that.     I say all of this as a very lofty preamble to me randomly picking up The Midnight Library and thinking ‘yeah I'll give this a shot' with minimal enthusiasm.  This is not my genre.  Under the vast majority of circumstances I never would have touched this.  But I decided to for some reason... and devoured the entire thing in a day.        The Midnight Library tells the story of Nora Seed, a depressed woman who decides to kill herself at midnight one night due to feeling like her life is worthless.  While she is in a state of limbo, she enters the titular Midnight Library, a place that allows her to go into any alternate life she may have lived had she made any different choice.  Some of these lives are radically different, others are very similar to her current life.  Along the way she finds out that she wants to live in her ‘root life' and forces herself into consciousness in the ‘real world' and saves herself from her own suicide attempt.    Writing this all out makes the book sound very cheesy and predictable.  I'm sure if I were to go up to 100 random people and ask ‘how do you think a book where a woman is given the opportunity to choose between any other life she could have lived and the one she currently has would end' and all 100 people would say ‘she chooses her current life because she discovers the joy of her current life'.  It's not exactly the hardest plot to figure out.     But... this book just worked for me on this day.  One truly magical thing about reading is that you can read the same book at various points in your life and those same words can hit you totally differently.  A Separate Peace by John Knowles is one of my all-time favorite books, but if I had read it for the first time at 24 instead of 14 I doubt that'd be the case.  On a similar note, had I read The Midnight Library at 14 I probably wouldn't have liked it.  But this book is exactly what I needed right now.  This is one that is going to stick with me forever.  Thank you Matt Haig.