Amazon.in:Customer reviews: The Midnight Library

Reviewed in India on 24 October 2020

Delievery : excellent condition and two days before the deadline

Now comes the book review:
U need to be a little bold to read the first few chapters... It's a great book and would be awesome if u imagine the scene of the story. It's a book not for fun reading but to expand and discover new ideas. U may also overcome procrastination and bad habits cause u would value ur life more.
Overall, it's not for fun reading. It's an excellent book though.

21 people found this helpful

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Firdaus Samad

One time read

Reviewed in India on 3 January 2021

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Pros of this book:
🌸 The theme is love
🌸 Mental health awareness
🌸 Magical realism
🌸 Fast-paced
🌸 Page turner
🌸 Okay for a one-time read.

Cons of this book:
👀 I got super bored in the middle
👀 Did not like the 'always' whiney and dissatisfaction with everything in the life of Nora Seed.
👀 Very predictable ending.

I am sorry to disagree with all the readers who cherished this book and gave it 5 stars. It just didn't resonate with me. Please don't hate me. 😭 When I started reading it, I was mesmerized by the plot and everything. I even wanted a life like Nora where I could have choices to let go of the regrets and live a different kind of life. But the graph suddenly dropped for me as I crossed 100 pages. I can't stand perpetual whiney people in my life too so it became too much for me to read about Nora's regrets and complaints.

I have mentioned the pros and cons above. However, I would suggest if you want to read it, don't buy it as it was for Rs 549 and I felt I wasted my money. I would have been more satisfied if I would have borrowed it from my friend or a library.

14 people found this helpful

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Sanchary Ghosh

Beautiful and Necessary

Reviewed in India on 12 November 2020

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This book is beautiful! It's an extremely important book that incorporates many philosophical concepts to remind us of what really matters eventually. The midnight library is a delightful place and if we had our own, what couldn't we do with it. Must read though to be fair, it's a little too simplistic in places.

9 people found this helpful

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Anantha Narayan

Never underestimate the big importance of small things

Reviewed in India on 15 January 2021

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How many times have we wondered with regret, as we grew older, on how life could have been otherwise — what if we had chosen a different career, what if we had loved differently, what if we had held on to some of our broken relationships, or what if we had handled our finances better? This, despite understanding that such regrets can only diminish the quality of our current lives. The Midnight Library cautions us to think more carefully about what we wish for, and gently nudges us to be more comfortable in with what we have.

This book is a combination of science fiction and human relationships pertaining to the little things that matter. It is not completely new though. I’m aware of at least two movies (Click and the Bollywood movie Baar Baar Dekho) that had similar premises. The main protagonist is the extremely talented 35 year old Nora Seed, who lives in her childhood town of Bedford. She could have been an Olympic swimmer, part of a Coldplay-like band, an academic high-achiever or an oceanographer and a happy wife and mother at the same time. But a combination of misfortune and a “life fright”, as one of the other characters in the story puts it, causes her to disintegrate wanting her nothing more than the absence of pain. And that brings her to The Midnight Library where there are seemingly endless books on how her life would be if she had made some other decision at some point in her life. The starting point is The Book of Regrets which details all that she would have liked to change. And she can choose to change any of that and then step in to live the life that would have ensued.

Haig has had his own issues with depression and nearly killed himself once. In that light, the book is one of the struggles of a depressed person and redemption. The book begins with a lot of promise. The setup is interesting and provokes thought. However, despite a short length of under 300 pages, the book starts feeling repetitive fairly soon, feels episodic and seems a tad too glib. It’s almost as if Haig came up with a brilliant idea but didn’t really know how to stretch it to a decent-sized novel. This book was somewhere between a 3-star and a 4-star for me. What swung it towards the latter is that it can help readers minimise the regrets that they have and leaves them with an important message, as voiced by Mrs. Elm, The Librarian: “Never underestimate the big importance of small things”.

Pros: Interesting plot, helps readers minimise the regrets that they have

Cons: Becomes repetitive

2 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

On time delivery, great book

Reviewed in India on 2 December 2020

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On time delivery.

I've never been into self-help books, atleast that's what I thought until I read this one. This is not at all a book full of theories, It's a novel which is magical realistic in nature.
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If you're someone who has been struggling with mental health issues(like I've been, since I was a 9 year old kid), then you may get a feeling that this book is actually telling you your own story; and it is not judging you, but helping you instead. The book tells us that, regrets, if they become uncontrollably excessive, ultimately take the form of the burden that keeps us from moving forward in life. In many cases those regrets do not even have a base in reality, many of the regrets that make us suffer are just the mere speculations of our mind.
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Each life is worth living.
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I've never realized how much I needed this book until I actually started reading it. Thank you @mattzhaig , this person will forever be grateful to you for creating this friend. 💚

4 people found this helpful

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Abhishek Mishra

Perfect Self Help book masquerading as a fantasy

Reviewed in India on 23 March 2021

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📚📚📚📚📚
"An unfinished jigsaw of a human. Incomplete living and incomplete dying."
This quote is what Nora feels about herself. She is a 35 year old suffering from depression. When everything becomes too much for her to handle, she tries to commit suicide. This lands her in The Midnight Library, a place between life and death. Where every single book is a life she could have had. This story is her quest to believe in herself so that she could utter the three most powerful words anyone can say. 'I AM ALIVE'.
📚📚📚📚📚

This book is great. It is kind of a self help book masquerading as a fantasy. Still it is better than most of the self help books out there. The portrayal of depression, the self destructive thought process changing into one of confidence is brilliantly portrayed.

This book is very personal for me. It has it's flaws but I still wish I would have gotten this book 3-4 years ago when I really needed it. I won't rate this book because it's difficult for me to be objective.

Wrapping Up, the quote which is my favourite:

" She realised that she hadn't tried ro end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery."

One person found this helpful

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Dikshita Damodaran

Buy it now!

Reviewed in India on 28 January 2021

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Nora Seed feels useless and unwanted which pushes her to an extent that one day she decides to take her life. But instead of facing death, she enters the Midnight Library which is a world between life and death.
"It is not the real world in a conventional sense. But nor is it a dream. It isn’t one thing or another. It is, in short, the Midnight Library."

The book takes us through the journey of Nora Seed wherein she is given various choices of alternative lives in the form of books. She can enter into these lives and choose to stay or leave.
"You have as many lives as you have possibilities. There are lives where you make different choices. And those choices lead to different outcomes. If you had done just one thing differently, you would have a different life story. And they all exist in the Midnight Library. They are all as real as this life."

Every now and then, all of us have thoughts as to how certain alternate choices could have made our lives better. But most of the time, we tend to overestimate its bearing on our lives. What stood out for me in this book is the fact that this overestimation that gives us sleepless nights and anxiety have been dealt so beautifully by Matt Haig through the eyes of Nora Seed.

"Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad."

The book is a breath of fresh air and captures the issue of depression in the best possible manner. I had read it on social media, that someone had told Matt Haig that the Midnight Library helped his daughter overcome depression. Honestly, I can say that I totally believe it.
This book gave me the positivity that I was looking for and gave me the solution to certain issues that were lying unresolved in my own head. I would recommend it to each and everyone because as far as I know, we all have a Nora Seed in us looking for answers and this book might have them because "You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it."

One person found this helpful

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Pradeepa

Necessary life lesson!

Reviewed in India on 5 February 2021

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After seeing this book making rounds in my feed for a while, I decided to take it up for a change, as it has been a very long time since I have read a fiction novel.

I won’t say I was much excited through the read, because I did guess the story long before the actual ending happened. The idea of getting to try and live multiple parallel lives didn’t actually stick with me. It felt like a huge responsibility than one could imagine and I kind of felt bored out in the midway.

At 00.00.00, Nora Seed decides to die. She could have made something beautiful out of her life, but nothing felt possible because of her retreat from each and every possibility.

She lands up in the midnight library, more like a medium between Life and Death with Mrs.Elm, a librarian, to guide her. The library is filled with books, each containing one of her many lives. Mrs. Elm guides her to choose a book where she could have a different life from the one existed and if she feels disappointed, she will be pulled back in the library. This goes on for a while. She tries out multiple lives in search of a perfect life and finally ends up losing herself in the process.

Through all this, Nora realises two important things. One, she doesn’t want to die and the other, she has lived all these years only for the satisfaction of others. She decides to retreat to her original life to make the most out of it. But, will she be able to go back?

I am putting up two interesting thoughts which I liked much from the book.

There is a huge difference between Fear and despair.

’Fear was when you wandered in to a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed behind you’ - Mrs. Elm.

‘Life begins on the other side of despair’ - Sartre

Sometimes, we think a lot about what could have happened if a different path was chosen or sometimes, we imagine a lot to have a perfect life and fail to make the most out of the one we already have. The life given to us is, in one way messy, but, messily perfect!

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Charan

Extended Version of the Film "It's a Wonderful Life"

Reviewed in India on 14 April 2021

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What a wild ride of science, fiction, fantasies, philosophy, and most importantly about life itself! Such a soul-cleansing book that I'd read in a while. Nora seed's character arc from chapter to chapter is so impactful that you hardly keep the book down. The book revolves around an intriguing theme on What if, you have the chance to try another life?.

What actually this Midnight Library does and why Nora Seed is there and what book she's choosing to get that perfect life is amazingly written page after page. Planting Henry David Thoreau's quotes and philosophical views in between the life incidents of Nora is a sheer master class.

What attracted me the most was Matt's idea of mini and micro chapters while narrating the story. The conscious decision to make such small chapters based on the current generation readers' attention span can't go unnoticed. Being crisp is so admirable. This relationship of the characters with the internet will be evidence of our today's life for centuries to come. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and all other internet spaces were hidden among the characters subtly which reflect the generation that the story is revolving around.

Usage of simple sentences of a character having self-pity, change of dialogue patterns when Nora realizes the value of the root life, Sharp explanations behind Schrodinger's cat experiment through a different character, and the disappointment factors following up on each life makes this novel get that unique voice through Nora Seed.

I can't close this without talking about the importance of Mrs. Elm's character in this book. It makes me realize that we all have someone like Elm in our lives, unfortunately knowingly or unknowingly most of us are out of touch with them or lost them already. Honestly, I loved Mrs. Elm more than Nora.

To me, this book is an extended version of the film "It's a Wonderful Life" by Frank Capra.

Undoubtedly, a must-read!

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Ayesha_M

An utterly uplifting book!

Reviewed in India on 23 November 2020

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An utterly uplifting book!
We've all thought of the life we could have lived. Wrong turns have come easy. And as of 2020, we have felt stuck in them for longer than we would have liked. But The Midnight Library gives its protagonist, Nora Seed a chance to undo her regrets.
From the start, the story is based on the truism of living life without regrets. Parts of it are even predictable. Haig inevitably focuses on perspective. And as Nora shifts the course of her life, (or many lives) the author's emphasis on perspective delivers.
The Midnight Library is found in limbo, a magical space that offers many takes on life. Nora is a world famous rockstar but then she is also unemployed at home. The highlight of the book comes not in the tale but in the many theories and abstractions the author indulges in. Things are seen through the eyes of a guardian angel or philosopher Henry David Thoreau or even natural sciences and quantum physics.
Though this book is not officially from the motivational genre, it is definitely in close range. So if you've spent your time turning your head back, looking at the past, then this book is a must. Because just like Nora you will realize the freedom that lies ahead.

One person found this helpful

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5 star		56%
4 star		30%
3 star		11%
2 star		2%
1 star		1%

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