The Midnight Library: Summary

I got the book “The Midnight Library” from a YouTube channel called The Book Show. This book is perfect for people with many regrets, who feel like they made wrong decisions, and feel useless. It tells the story of Nora Seed, a philosophy graduate in her 30s, who decides to end her life. She has lost her job, her cat died, she isn’t on good terms with her brother, she’s waiting for a friend’s reply, she gave up on music, and even her neighbor doesn’t want her around.

Instead of dying, Nora ends up in a library between life and death. This library has infinite books, each showing a different choice she could have made.  She living in a multiverse with multiple life. Mrs. Elm, her childhood librarian who was kind to her, is there to guide her. Nora has a book full of regrets, and as she explores different lives, her regrets lessen.

At first, she wishes to live with her ex-boyfriend, but he turns out to be mean. She wishes to live with her friend, but her friend died in a car accident. She tries being a pop star but feels lonely, then an Olympic swimmer but loses her mother, and even a glaciologist and a winemaker, among many others. Each life has something missing. Whenever she feels unsatisfied, she returns to the library.

Eventually, she realizes there is no perfect life. In one life, she likes being married to Ash and having a kid named Molly, with her friends alive, though her parents aren’t. Everything seems fine until she finds Mrs. Elm has died in that life. This creates a void feeling. This is a prefect life as she says. But she returns to the library. The library starts burning, and she escapes by writing on a blank page that she wants to live, saying, “I am alive.” She returns to her old life, realizing there is no perfect life, and learns to appreciate her decisions.

The story ends with her playing chess with Mrs. Elm, not knowing what her next move will be. The story might seem predictable at first, but the author’s imaginative nature keeps us hooked until the last page. It reminded me of Thoreau, and I might read his books later on. Here are some verses or lines I liked from the book.

Loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.

Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently.

Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don’t even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.

Never underestimate the big importance of small things.

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.
 
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

Life isn’t simply made of the things we do, but the things we don’t do too.

Other lives that would have been different if you’d taken different directions earlier in your life. This is a tree of life.

Life is full of strange phenomena.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Human beings were wired to know only a hundred and fifty people, as that was the average size of hunter-gatherer communities.

Maybe it was important enough to aim to do something good. To help preserve life, in all its forms.

Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.

I would think that the human brain can’t handle the complexity of an open quantum wave function and so it organizes or translates this complexity into something.

Everything humans see is a simplification. Minds can’t see what they can’t handle.

You are only limited by your imagination.

All good things are wild and free.

She had a fire inside her. She wondered if the fire was to warm her or destroy her. Then she realised. A fire had no motive. Only she could have that. The power was hers.

All the excellent outcomes were the result of ‘the wise choice of many alternatives.

You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’ Nora shook her head. It is was a bit too much for a Philosophy graduate to take.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.

Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations.

Want is an interesting word. It means lack. 

We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. 

Cheers!

Thank you for reading ♡!

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