the midnight library

304 pages
Title: Everything is F*cked
Author: Matt Haig
Genre: Fantasy, Science, Philosophical Fiction, Contemporary
Published: September 29, 2020

Available in Hardcover, Softcover, Audiobook, and Ebook

Between life and death, there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything differently, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?.

The Midnight Library is a very special place found between life and death.  You could say it’s the ‘in-between. This is where time itself stops for one to explore its plethora of books. Each book contains the life of a person and the many lives they lived based on the choices they made.

We start this adventure with our depressed thirty-something-year-old protagonist ex-cat lady, Nora Seed. After living a life of misery and regret, she is given the chance to live her other lives and see what resulted in the choices she didn’t make, like becoming a rockstar, even a pub owner, a glaciologist in the search for existential questions or a surfer who lost her best friend and even an Olympic swimmer.

But this adventure doesn’t last forever. In the end, she has to choose as to which life she wants to live. While doing so, she must answer the ultimate question: Which life is worth living?

The Midnight Library is one of the most worthy books to be placed in your collection. This book hit me hard that it kept me thinking about it for days on end after finishing.  It is quite relatable as Nora also has the mindset of any millennial, the fear of missing out or commonly known as FOMO. We get to see a glimpse into how Nora lived her life and how she arrived at the midnight library all the while talking to some omniscient being in the form of her favorite childhood librarian. She shares her ups and downs and inner thoughts and ramblings and turmoil.

I have a feeling that the author himself experienced the same mental hurdles that Nora went through as how he described depression and anxiety was quite accurate from mindset down to medication. 

This book is a very worthwhile read. Especially if you’re into existential questions and philosophical reasoning while being entertained by the very notion of

‘WHAT IF…’

 

If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don't give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.