The Midnight Library — Book Review
Best book to end your year with
If you’re in your early 20s and struggling with life, give this book a read
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Goodreads Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Summary: Nora Seed (the protagonist) tries to commit suicide and finds herself between life and death. In between life and death, there’s a library with an infinite number of books. Each book is a chance to try another life which Nora could have lived if she had made other choices. It’s a chance for her to undo her regrets and learn about life maybe.
Review: Recently, in a Tafseer lecture, I learnt about يهدي القلب and سلام القلب, which summarizes how one finds peace of heart when his heart is guided by Allah. And in that period, I was reading this book as well. I know this book ain’t some religious one. But, this is the power of analogy that helps you relate two unrelated things.
This book with its core purpose will help you find peace within you. It defines how one doesn’t need some validation from the outer source to be happy and at peace. The thing about life is you can only pick choices and not their consequences. And then, adore nature, life, and everything about it.
You can be happy even without a penny in your pocket. And with no one by your side. It’s a journey of Nora and as well as the reader to learn about life.
She was privileged to have this chance to experience all those lives she could have lived and understand why she is right where she is supposed to be (in her root life). But, we’re not the sliders (people who can slide between universes as per the book) we have one chance only. And we’re supposed to make the best out of it.
Every decision you take in this life leads to different consequences. And so, you can be as many things in the universe as you want. You have the potential. You just need to believe in yourself and lay the first stone, push yourself for once and everything else will follow.
And then, even if in the middle of whatever you wanted to achieve you feel like not wanting it anymore, you have the potential to restart. At any point in life, you can have a new life. Just like Nora who was 35 when she actually started to live and love life.
It is inspiring how Nora finally found her path and figured out what she wanted to be, in her mid-thirties, while many of us in our early 20s are stressing over careers, money and having to find a path that leads to a perfect life. THERE’S NO PERFECT LIFE.
You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it. (Mrs. Elm — The Midnight Library)
And eventually, happiness is not getting what you want. It is within you.
You can have everything and still feel nothing. (Nora Seed — The Midnight Library)
⬆️I loved the fact that the writer explained this one line with many lives of Nora Seed.
This book is a mixture of fantasy fiction, philosophical fiction, and science fiction. The writer explained Nora’s slipping into the other universes with the help of Erwin Schrondinger’s explanation of Quantum Superposition. That is how the cat in the box is both alive and dead. Interesting, right?
He says the principle of Quantum wave function is real. “The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests that there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes. Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision, you make.”
He says, “The human brain can’t handle the complexity of an open quantum wave function and so it translates this complexity into something it understands.”
For instance, we don’t see the complex matter of a tree. We just see a tree. Or how we don’t see the second hand of a clock mid-tick!🤥
All of this with an interesting combination of philosophy makes this book a worth read.
Nora was basically a philosophy graduate and she think of different philosophers and their work at different points of her journey between life and death (THE 00:00:00)
Henry David Thoreau was her favorite philosopher. And you’ll get to learn a lot about life from him in this book.
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. And part of this success is the product of being alone. I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. (Henry David Thoreau)
There were many parts in the book that made me emotional, but the one that made me cry was when Nora got to talk to her dead father in another universe. Matt Haig (the writer) wrote that scene beautifully.
It’s interesting how the writer keeps you hooked till the end to find out whether Nora got to live or died. Well, I am an impatient reader, I googled it before the ending 😆
Snippets from the Midnight Library:
People with Stamina aren’t made any differently to anyone else. The only difference is they have a clear goal in mind and determination to get there.
The thing you need to realise is this: the game is never over until it is over.
It is easy to imagine that there can be easier paths in life. However, there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness. forever. Failure and tragedy are the by-products of living.
When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.
Give this book a read. I lovedddd it. It’s a little slow in the beginning, but once Nora enters the library, the book will lose its gravity😁. And if you’ve already read this book, let me know in the comment section below, what you loved the most about this book. Seriously, it has the potential to make you romanticize life❤
-Till next time
Loads of love and jelly tots🙌❣️
