The Midnight Library

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…’