#the midnight library
For anyone who enjoyed The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, I recommend The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. It has a similar theme of what makes a life fulfilled (for lack of a better word), and while it does have a very sad beginning, the ending is amazingly done. Here’s the book summary from the internet:
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 different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?
InThe Midnight Library, Matt Haig’s enchanting new novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
(sorry, I’m awful at descriptions, but I had to share this book)
“Because sometimes the only way to learn is to live”
The Midnight Library, Matt Haig
I’ve been in a reading frenzy this past month, here’s what I’ve actually finished.
Piranesi is the most recent book I’ve read, and I’ve got the biggest book hangover now. Review coming soon, cannot recommended it enough. Drop you current reads and recommendations, cozy book season has officially begun.
I honestly can’t remember the last time I did a book review. I do know that there have been several books I have read between my last entry and now, but this…this is the book I just had to post about.
This last year had been a doozy, not just myself but for the entire world. As a health care professional, I’ve struggled mentally, emotionally, and physically with the stress of working during a pandemic. As such, I’ve been grappling with what I want out of life and what direction it’s taking. And in doing so, certain regrets have surfaced and forced me to confront them.
Haig’s writing is mesmerizing, combining amazing story telling with philosophy without becoming overly weighed down. In a world where there has been so much sadness, I am so grateful to have had the chance to read a book that exudes hope and the promise of life itself.
I finished this book in a day, partially because it’s only 288 pages, but mostly because it’s just that good. I can’t recommend it enough, and am so happy to give it a place on my favorites shelf.
As always, recommendations much appreciated!
“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.”— The Midnight Library, Matt Haig
I just finished reading The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, and it left me pondering about my life. The book tells a story about a woman getting a second chance and making different decisions that affected the outcome of her life.
I know we all spend time thinking about the “what ifs” of our lives. It’s something we can’t help. There’s the small decisions like: what if I had gotten the iced chai instead of the iced coffee, but then there’s the big decisions of: what if I moved to Phoenix instead of Germany?
When i think about the major decisions that have affected my life a few that come to mind are: choosing the college I went to, choosing to join the sorority I did, choosing my major, moving to a foreign country instead of to the big city I promised my friends after college, then working at a national park.
I’ll even go further back to think about if certain events that I had no control over didn’t happen. What if my dad didn’t die? What if my nana and papa never got divorced? What if the pandemic never happened?
Younger me would dwell on some of these questions and be really upset about this. But the older and present me is aware of what might have happened and the things I would have missed out on if my life didn’t turn out the way it had.
Going to my college and joining my sorority led me to meeting my best friends. I truly believe I am the reason they all became the friends they are now. Two of them might have been friends without my help or other paths would have led them to all meet, but I know I helped make it happen. Then when it comes to what i decided to major in. It all started because I wanted to take the intro level class to learn more about what it offered but I couldn’t take the class unless that was my major, so i switched it then and there and stuck with it ever since. Then because of that my uncle told me about a program working at a hotel abroad. Moving to the foreign country allowed me to live the dream i wanted and meet friends that I was able to go through such new and important life events with. I would have regretted moving to the big city because I now know the pandemic would have happened and my dream of being abroad would have been pushed off even more. If I had moved there, it never would have never led me to working at this national park because the reason I’m here is because one of my friends that I worked abroad with told me about it and another one pushed us into applying here.
Then theres the deeper ones that I had no control over and happened because of the decisions of others: If my dad did not die, my youngest sister would probably have never been born (considering we have different dads). My parents would have probably split up due to the differences they both wanted in life and how my mom described their relationship, then that would have led me to being raised in a broken home, moving back and forth, potentially never having lived the life that has made me appreciate the world around me and caused me to have a wandering soul. If my nana and papa never got divorced, I think I would still have a good relationship with them. But if they had stayed together, I know they would not have been happy and that could have made it even worse than it already is. Then theres the one we all feel because we all had to experience it: the pandemic. I’ll post an excerpt from my insta post that describes my feeling on the year of 2020: “This year sucked in more ways than one and so many tears were shed. I think we all hoped for 2020 to be our year. I had planned to see all of Europe & I had been considering staying in Germany until December of 2021. But it was cut short. I lost my job and was sent back to so much unknown. But I didn’t think it was fair to say that everything went wrong. So I wanted to use this time to reflect and share some genuine moments of me in my happiest form. This year was saved by the people I shared this time with. How blessed are you to be able to meet so many people that make a place so hard to leave? Someone play Happiest Year by Jaymes Young & How It Ends by DeVotchKa bc I’d like to dedicate it to them.” I found my love for reading again. I found worlds and characters that changed me for the better. I dream of stranger worlds now. I want to be a better person. I found comfort in being by myself. I no longer want to find pleasure in a moment only to be filled with regret after and live that constant loop. I am happy. This is what the book really made me think about: This is my life and any other life would be a fraud. This is everything I’ve worked towards and even though I could imagine it another way, I know I wouldn’t want it any other way.
I’ve had this book on my TBR for a while now and here are the quotes that really stood out to me in this book:
And though she’d studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.
‘Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,’ Thoreau had said. ‘Live the life you imagined’.
‘Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘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 different if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’
It was hard to remember what he had sounded like before. What he had been like, precisely. But that was the nature of memory…
Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.
This was the life she had been mourning for. This was the life she had beaten herself up for not living. This was the timeline she thought she had regretted not existing in.
The only way to learn is to live.
‘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 your 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..’
For Sylvia Plath, existence was a fig tree and each possible life she could live- the happily-married one, the successful poet one - was this sweet juicy fig, but she couldn’t get to taste the sweet juicy figs, so they just rotted right in front of her. It can drive you insane, thinking of all the other lives we don’t live.
Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.
The life of a human, according to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, was of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.
‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.’
I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.
All good things are wild and free.
You can have everything and feel nothing.
‘I think it is easy to imagine there are easier paths,’ she said, realising something for the first time. ‘But maybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths…
Who knows? Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.’
‘…It seems impossible to live without hurting people.’
‘Thats because it is.’
‘I am saying that the thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory. You have to keep going.’
It was as though she had reached some state of acceptance about life - that if there was a bad experience, there would only be bad experiences. She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.
‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’
A fear of what she was feeling.
Love.
You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.
What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind.
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you ever try to read a book and it’s like. damn they really just let anybody write these.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
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 different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?
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