I am alive

AUDIOBOOK REVIEW FROM DANA

The Midnight Library

By Matt Haig

Genre: Syfy, Time Travel, Fantasy

Narrated by Carey Mulligan

Publisher: Penguin Audio

“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?” 

Wow!  Just wow! This was one of the most beautiful books I have ever had the pleasure of reading. Nora Seed is caught in the library between life and death. It’s here that she has the chance to see all the lives she could’ve lived and decide if her life is worth living. Each book in the library represents an alternative life that Nora could have lived. Even just 1 slightly different choice could alter her future significantly, whether it be for worse or for better. Nora inquisitively explores a number of books in hopes she finds a life worth living. Matt Haig’s superb writing made it easy for me to imagine the library and each life in full detail. This story is fascinating, emotional, beautiful, and foundational.

This will likely hit too close to home for most readers, as it did for me as well. This book is about regrets, unfinished business, what if’s, could have been’s, mistakes, love, loss, heartache, resentment, self-doubt, choices, embracing life, and dreams. It’s about seeing every aspect of yourself and your potential. To have the opportunity to see what could have been. Each book, each path, each choice, each perspective, and complexity of chance shows us that life in itself is not perfect. But it doesn’t have to be perfect to be worth living. This book will stay with me like no other book ever has. When I have regrets in life or struggles, I will think of Nora and her library. If you struggle with depression, you MUST read this book!!!

Carey Mulligan is a new narrator for me. My God was she great! Another reviewer described her as “lyrical” and I agree. She was brilliant. I cannot imagine being on this journey with any other narrator.

Potentially Unlimited Stars for The Midnight Library!

FAVE QUOTES:

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee, or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do the people we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”

“She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential.”

“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.”

“And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness forever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”

“’You’re overthinking it.’ ‘I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.’”

“It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.”

“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”

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