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Thoughts on the Midnight Library

Reading Time: 2 minutes

In December I read The Midnight Library with ease. It is a lighter book than others and I could see parallels between Midnight Library and The Good Place. Specifically imagine a reality where you get to try reality after reality, after reality until you learn what you needed to learn, before the book or television series ends.

In the Good Place and the Midnight Library one or more individuals have the opportunity to try life A before trying life B before trying life C, over and over again. In the process they learn to see the nuance in what they like or don’t like.

Without too much of a spoiler imagine if you could see your book of regrets, and if you could go through each item in that book and see whether the "what if" would have been great, or mediocre.

In the book she gets to try each variation of her life, until eventually she realises what she had to realise and the book ends.

It’s interesting that such a book would be written during lockdown because it is during lockdown that people could really think about their lives up to that point and about what was good, and what was bad, and about what to change.

As I write this I saw the link with The Good Place, but I forgot to see the link with Groundhog Day. In the Midnight Library she always returns to midnight to try a variation of her life. In The Good Place there is a return to the day they get to the afterlife, and in Groundhog day he just repeats the same day over and over.

Would you want to try every variation of your life, with the "what ifs" getting answered or are you happy with living a linear life with opportunities not taking, and not knowing where those paths would have led?