Book Notes: The Midnight Library
Hi :’) Welcome back to a new book note blog post.
In all honesty, I’ve been in a state of trying to figure out what my next life ventures are, so I haven’t touched my blog since my mind has been occupied with these…neverending thoughts.
I will try to make more time to write though… I notice it’s really beneficial to my mental health.
I did finish a new book—hence, this blog post…duh.
Let’s chat about The Midnight Library.
photo found on Pinterest
What is it about?
Spoiler alert! (but not really, because the novel’s blurb exposes this fact): Nora Seed decides to end her life. Little did she know, there’s a world in-between life and death, and that is the Midnight Library. The Midnight Library holds countless books, but the twist is that each book actually holds a different reality of what her life could have been. Given the chance to live different lives through these books, Nora Seed is left with the question of whether she is actually ready to die.
How I Discovered It:
I saw my partner’s sister reading it (thanks Kyu-rie!)
Thoughts:
Life is all about balance.
When there’s good, there must be bad. When there’s happy, there must be sad. When there is excitement, there is stillness. When there is human connection, there must be solitude. When there is life, there must be death.
I am one who thinks about my past lives and my next ones quite frequently. I realized something profound in my twenties, and it’s that I feel this immense, internal pressure to be everything…to do everything, because I have this paralyzing fear of not living the life I have always dreamt of before I die.
Rather than be paralyzed by this fear though, I see that I have all the tools I need within me to live the life I continuously dream of. What matters most are the choices I have power over in this present moment. Can I change the past? No. Can I control the future? Absolutely not. It is in the present—the now—where I have the power to continue carving out my path.
Who Would Like It?
Those who are struggling under the weight of all the lives they are not living.
My Top 3 Quotes:
“It seemed the more lives she lived, the harder it was to feel at home anywhere.”
“She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn’t been true solitude. The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.”
“She had no idea where she lived or what she did or where she was meant to be heading after the swimming pool, but there was something quite freeing about that. To be existing without any expectation, even her own.”
date finished: ~June 28th, 2023
