Starting this a bit late as I’m already a few hours into the book, but the premise is the protagonist, Nora Seed, is a depressed 35 year old woman with many regrets and it’s implied she tries to kill herself (possible overdose) but instead of dying she goes to The Midnight Library.
She meets a person who looks and sounds like her childhood librarian, learns that time is stopped at midnight (00:00:00) at this library, and every book is a possible life she could live. So she explores different lives where she did things differently, e.g. marry the person she didn’t, become an Olympic swimmer, become a glaciologist, etc. Yet in each life she finds she isn’t happy.
That’s where I’m at so far, my guess is that the ending will be that there is no set life that makes her happy and that happiness has to come from within yada yada. A pretty trite conclusion, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, the book does have good reviews and came out recently, so perhaps the author will subvert my expectations.
Interestingly, as I was listening to it this morning (2022-02-24), the topic of Dunbar’s Number came up, which is interesting because just yesterday I was reading and responding to Crypto is here to set us free which also mentioned the concept. In this book, a character who I think is a potential love interest for Nora was saying that social media was bad for society because of Dunbar’s Number, that all those connections were meaningless because they weren’t deep connections. I agree with this, but it’s funny that I used to value having a high friend count on Facebook. Granted I was a kid, and perhaps that further strengthens the point that social media is especially bad for children.
I think I originally got this book because it was listed as sci-fi, but as I was listening to it I thought that the book was more generic fiction or closer to fantasy, but near the middle of the book it’s revealed that other people are able to try out different lives (they’re called sliders by the character who reveals this), and for each of them they have a different building (Nora has a library, the other guy had a video store with VHS tapes representing lives etc.) and the character speculated that it was quantum phenomena they were experiencing, a variation of the many worlds interpretation, and that there was a solution to the universal wave function. So I guess it’s a sci-fi, albeit soft since none of the science is explained but that’s not the point of the book anyways.
The theme where Nora keeps trying different lives trying to find the right path for her reminds me of the movie Mr. Nobody, which focuses around the idea of choosing a path in life and trying to pick the right life, but the message was that it didn’t matter, any life you choose will be the right life by virtue of the fact that you chose it. The quote goes “Each of these lives is the right one! Every path is the right path. Everything could have been anything else and it would have just as much meaning.”
The book has really good pacing, almost like a movie. Especially the part where it’s basically a montage of her trying a ton of different lives, I could totally see that as a montage in a movie right before the third act.
Near the end of the book Nora finds a perfect life with the surgeon who was into her, where she’s married to him, has a daughter, had a master’s in philosophy and was a professor of it and wrote books on it. But then she realized that people in her life that she had cared about were worse off, like her old man neighbor was in a nursing home instead of living on his own (she helped him with medications and an online shop so he could be independent), the boy she taught piano too was getting caught up in the wrong crowds and arrested for violent robbery, and Mrs. Elm had passed away. So despite how perfect the life seemed, she was taken out of it because on some level she knew it wasn’t right for her because there were people in her root life that she was helping/that needed her help.
I liked this take on it, sure the book did end with the cliché that you have to be happy with your life and make it the life you want vs. searching for another life based on some idea of what you think is the right life etc. But the part of thinking how your life affects others, and how you not being there will affect them resonated with me more, perhaps because I haven’t seen it be a focus as often in these kinds of stories. Or perhaps I just haven’t read these kind of stories enough. But I guess it resonated with me because it reminded me of the stuff Headspace talks about during meditation, the idea of being kinder to yourself and that spreading out to being kind to others, in the book it was finding purpose by realizing what you already do for those close to you, I guess just the idea of the realms of self and others being connected.
Anyways, I liked it. I’d watch the movie if they made one.