The Midnight Library

I think this is a such a beautiful book. Yes, it can feel like self-help, and reading the last couple reviews I can see how it didn't meet their expectations of new-world-fantasy, but I don't think it is straight up a self-help book.

The part that feels like self-help is that this book shows you, through the story, the process of gaining perspective, of looking at your life prom the POV of an observant and not the person living in it. I think it brilliantly put in one story all the things that we think about but cannot put together to fully understand how we feel about ourselves and our life.

But it also lightly incorporates interesting concepts of quantum physics, multiple realities, “dimension travellers”, and more. It reminded me at times of the movies Interstellar, and funnily enough, Bedazzled. For its concept of a library as a simplification of time and reality, and for the idea that what we “wish for” is not always how we expect it to be.

I loved the realness of the book. How relatable it was in terms of how we look at our regrets, and how we look for perfection and total absence of pain, but in truth this is not achievable (and this is not me being pessimistic). We need to accept that the messiness, imperfection and chaos, are part of the experience of life and it does more harm than good to cling to the past and only focus on the things that are going wrong. And one of my favourite pieces is how Nora realizes that she has the potential to be anything which gives her hope in the face of uncertainty.

There was one part I failed to understand: when the librarian mentions that the number of books is the same as when Nora entered the library, even though Nora had already gone through a bunch. If the books are variations of her life based on her decisions in her root life, and she is unconscious, how can there be more realities? Or is this just to illustrate the magnitude of “infinity”?

Where I think this book could have incorporated some more interesting sci-if aspects is with the librarian and the system. When there is that “transfer error”(?) I thought it was going to be more exciting and computer-y