17. The Midnight Library

By Matt Haig

It’s nice to read an international bestseller now and then, to consume something "of the now" so I can feel like a part of the crowd or something (and also have an opinion if the occasion arises).  The Midnight Library was one of two bestsellers I’ve read this past year (the other being Gone Girl).

 

The Midnight Library was also chosen for the last book club meeting at my workplace.  Although I haven’t participated in the book club for some time (I tried once with Wherethe Crawdads Sing),seeing that they were doing The Midnight Library spurred me to read it on my own as I had a copy thanks to my last visit to Encore Books.

 

As expected, The Midnight Library was a breezy read, like a feel-good version of Ken Grimwood’s Replay.  Instead of dying of a heart attack at 43 and reincarnating 25 years earlier in your younger body with all memories intact, with each "re-awakening" having the opportunity for a new do-over, Nora Seed overdoses on sleeping pills and ends up in The Midnight Library, a magical place containing an infinite number of books each representing a parallel life of yours had you made different choices, big or trivial.  The library is managed by someone who was dear to you (in Nora’s case, her school librarian Mrs. Elm, and is also a place where time stops at midnight as you hover between life and death.  While you’re in this state, you can slip into another version of your life in a parallel universe simply by choosing a book and reading the first line.

 

What reminded me of Replay was in one of Nora's lives as a glaciologist, she met a man named Hugo, who was also a “slider” or “life jumper”.  He had the same ability as her, except that he’d done this a lot longer, having sampled dozens, if not hundreds, of lives.  Instead of a library though, Hugo’s quantum Shroedinger-esque in-between state was represented by a Midnight Video Store.  Pretty cute, huh?

 

While Replay was an awesome sci-fi/fantasy novel, The Midnight Library was appealing and cute, as author Matt Haig clearly had aspirations for his novel to be inspiring, life-affirming, etc. etc. I've read feel-good books that have really rubbed me the wrong way, like The House by the Cerulean Sea, which I truly regret reading.  Had I known it was going to be such a saccharine piece of tripe, I wouldn't have read it.  Actually that's not fair to tripe, which I would've probably derived more enjoyment out of consuming.  But The House... was something that would've belonged in my very own Book of Regrets.  Or more like Book of Books I Regret Reading!

 

In any case, I don't regret having read The Midnight Library. It was better written than The House by the Cerulean Sea, and I even got emotionally caught up in parts of it.  Also, Matt Haig is really British while TJ Klune is American trying to write British.  I also, by default, like any book featuring a cat.  Still, The Midnight Library had its flaws.  There were parts that were a little too simple, or indulgent, or went on for too long.  For example, the part where it listed all the lives that Nora lead.  Whatevs - I just skimmed that section.  Also, some of the lives Nora lead were a little far-fetched.  In one life she was the Olympian swimmer she could’ve been. Ok fine. But in another, she was a famous rock star who was as big as Radiohead (and had dated a famous Hollywood star)!  Some metaphors were also a little too pat.  Like the protagonist's name, for instance.  Nora Seed.  She has to experience the multiple branches of her life before she can truly appreciate her “root life”.  Get it?

 

I can also see how The Midnight Library would’ve been The House by the Cerulean Sea for some readers, as it really does over-simplify the complexities of why someone would want to end their life.  One Goodreads reviewer summed it up nicely:

I liked this book until it suddenly decided to moonlight as a self-help manual, replete with messages that would look great and profound on an Instagram post next to a well-posed cup of coffee with those foam pictures on top. Or embroidered on a pillow — pick your poison.

And these messages have the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Another Goodreads reviewer also had a good point about how The Midnight Library could even be problematic in regards to mental illness:

I also have issues with the core messages in this book. Nora finally learns her lesson, but it's only after having fixated on each regret, remade every decision, and lived all subsequent lives. Like come on, at some point, you just have to be okay with who you are and the decisions you've made without knowing every single possible outcome.

 

But my biggest issue is that I'm really uncomfortable with this book's implication that if you're depressed, you only need to change your mindset and you will feel better. That goes against everything we understand about mental illness, including that it's important to seek professional help, that it can be chemically based, and that it's not a matter of not trying hard enough.

 

We already have enough trouble as a society getting depression and mental illness taken seriously, without a "feelgood" book coming along and implying that you need nothing more than an attitude adjustment to cure it. That puts the blame squarely where it doesn't belong, on the hundreds of millions of people who are suffering from depression. But it isn't just the layman who harbors such misunderstandings. It also includes people who work in the mental health field, and even some therapists and psychiatrists. So you can understand my dismay at the continued popularity of this book, which further perpetrates this extremely toxic point of view 

In any case, I wanted to get this review done so I can pass this book on, probably resell it even.

 

 

16. The Woman in Black

By Susan Hill

While in Vancouver, we once again visited Tanglewood Books looking for YA fiction for our 12 yo.  I found a trade paperback of The Woman in Black.  Even though I've been aware of Susan Hill's 1983 ghost story for some time (thanks to at least two film adaptations, neither of which I saw), it was Monster, She Wrote that got me to put The Woman in Black in my book list.

I was later surprised to see my daughter had started reading the novella.  When she finished it, she thought it was "all right" (her default answer for most things), though she mostly found it kind of boring.

Now here I am with a short review of The Woman In Black.  I knew I'd appreciate it somewhat more than my Gen Z kid.  Even though it was rather tame in some regards, I found it effectively chilling in a low-key way.  A lot of it had to do with Hill's writing.  It's written in a classic, straightforward manner yet manages to evoke a clear sense of setting and mood, and the narrative is framed from the POV of solicitor Arthur Kripps.  It begins with a middle-aged Kripps spending a Christmas evening with his second wife and two stepchildren.  He's asked to tell a ghost story, but he's unable to because of the traumatic experience he had as a young solicitor in London when he was sent off to a remote region to take care of the affairs of a recently deceased widow at Eel Marsh House.

We follow Kripps on his journey northeast from London to the village of Crythin Gifford. There he meets a local contact and he attends the funeral of Mrs Dablow, the reclusive elderly woman who resided at Eel Marsh House all her life.  It's at the funeral where Kripps first sees a pale, mysterious woman dressed all in black from a distance.  The next day, a local coachman takes Kripps to Eel Marsh House, which is situated on a tidal island and is only accessible via a causeway when the tide is low.  This means that when the tide is high, you're effectively cut off from the mainland and the causeway is only passable twice a day.

...As we drew nearer, I saw that the water was lying only shallowly over the rippling sand on either side of us, and that the line was in fact a narrow track leading directly ahead, as if into the estuary itself. As we slipped onto it, I realized that this must be the Nine Lives Causeway – this and nothing more – and saw how, when the tide came in, it would quickly be quite submerged and untraceable. 

     At first the pony and then the trap met the sandy path, the smart noise we had been making ceased, and we went on almost in silence save for a hissing, silky sort of sound. Here and there were clumps of reeds, bleached bone-pale, and now and again the faintest of winds caused them to rattle dryly. The sun at our backs reflected in the water all around so that everything shone and glistened like the surface of a mirror, and the sky had taken on a faint pinkish tinge at the edges, and this in turn became reflected in the marsh and the water. Then, as it was so bright that it hurt my eyes to go on staring at it, I looked up ahead and saw, as if rising out of the water itself, a tall, gaunt house of grey stone with a slate roof, that now gleamed steelily in the light. It stood like some lighthouse, or beacon or martello tower, facing the whole, wide expanse of marsh and estuary, the most astonishingly situated house I had ever seen or could ever conceivably have imagined, isolated, uncompromising but also, I thought, handsome. As we neared it, I saw the land on which it stood was raised up a little, surrounding it on every side for perhaps three or four hundred yards, of plain, saltbleached grass, and then gravel. This little island extended in a southerly direction across an area of scrub and field towards what looked like the fragmentary ruins of some old church or chapel. 

     There was a rough scraping, as the cart came onto the stones, and then pulled up. We had arrived at Eel Marsh House. 

The village of Crythin Gifford was effectively cursed, but everyone is too frightened to voice it aloud, or unable to warn Arthur because it's something that defies reason and logic.  Arthur Kripps has no choice but to do his job and so he gets himself involved in the local lore after seeing odd sightings of a woman in a black old-fashioned dress.  I feel the old-fashioned ghost story is vastly under-rated and very hard to do well because so much of it hinges on the quality of the writing.  I felt I was inhabiting Arthur's character more than just empathizing with what he's experiencing while he's stuck inside Eel Marsh House seeing strange occurrences he can't explain.

...Last night I had been adamant and would have brooked no possible opposition – I was having nothing more to do with Eel Marsh and the Drablow business but would telegraph to Mr Bentley, leave matters - in the hands of Mr Jerome and take the first available train to London. In short, I was going to run away. Yes, that was how I saw it in the bright light of day. I attached no particular blame to my decision. I had been as badly frightened as a man could be. I did not think that I would be the first to run from physical risks and dangers, although I had no reason to suppose myself markedly braver than the next person. But these other matters were altogether more terrifying, because they were intangible and inexplicable, incapable of proof and yet so deeply affecting. I began to realize that what had frightened me most – and, as I investigated my own thoughts and feelings that morning, what continued to frighten me – was not what I had seen –there had been nothing intrinsically repellent or horrifying about the woman with the wasted face. It was true that the ghastly sounds I had heard through the fog had greatly upset me but far worse was what emanated from and surrounded these things and arose to unsteady me, an atmosphere, a force – I do not exactly know what to call it – of evil and uncleanness, of terror and suffering, of malevolence and bitter anger. I felt quite at a loss to cope with any of these things. 

I can now see how my 12 yo would've found this book rather boring.  Maybe she'll appreciate it when I make her read it when she's fully grown!

I also thought Hammer Films did a really nice job adapting the novel into a 2012 film when I finally watched in some months later.

15. straydog

By Kathe Koja

Last summer, we were going to meet friends for dinner on Main St. and made a point of stopping by Pulp Fiction about an hour earlier to browse a bit.  Olman, unsurprisingly, found a small stack of paperbacks.  The owner was there and I overheard Olman asking him if he happened to have anything by so-and-so, etc.  At some point, I'd been browsing their new books section, and thought I’d inquire if he had anything by Kathe Koja.  He immediately replied with “Oh, I know I don’t have anything by her and probably won’t ever” implying along the lines that she’s been long out of print and her books are hard to find. 

 

His know-it-all, somewhat dismissive tone did not inspire me to argue with him, yet I knew there have been at least one recent reissue of her work, namely her most well-known novel, The Cipher, which was how I became interested in her in the first place. A simple google search also revealed that Skin had been reprinted in early 2025 by the same Meerkat Press who had released the 2020 reissue of The Cipher. If the owner had been doing his job properly, he would have had copies of Skin and The Cipher in the new section!  Even the Pulp Fiction homepage proclaims:

While our corporate competitors "diversify" away from print into bath towels, candles, chocolates & blankets, we're sticking with what we do best: an unrivalled selection of new, used, & out-of-print books chosen by readers, not algorithms. 

What’s more, I found out later that several paperback editions by Koja are available at corporate candle-and-chocolate seller Indigo Books, so what gives, other than the fact that the Pulp Fiction guy was an ignorant idiot!  Which brings me to Straydog (2002). I was looking at ordering the Graphic Novel Builder  via my neighbourhood bookstore for my daughter’s upcoming birthday, but that's when I discovered Straydog was at Indigo and because D&Q didn’t have Straydog, I ended up ordering both books from Indigo.  TBH, Koya’s oeuvre is a little too out there for me, but I would probably read Skin. Straydog appealed to me more because it was marketed as a young adult novel. 

 

A high school outcast, Rachel, volunteers part-time at an animal shelter after school. She develops a bond with a feral collie that was recently brought into the shelter. While writing a short story to submit to a competition, she begins to identify with the dog to an almost hyper-obsessive degree. 

Koja has a cult following primarily due to her uncanny ability to portray the outcast in society -- warts and all. Anyone who’s ever been in the fringes throughout high school would identify with Rachel's internal monologue, her harsh assessment of the popular kids, her unspoken longing to belong somewhere and her fear of connection because it’s just so damn strange and unfamiliar.  I believe I would have identified with Rachel had I read this in my early teens.

 

Straydog explores adolescent coming of age in a way few YA books have, then and now. It’s very realistic, and not always pleasant to read.  Even though it features a kind of meet-cute with a fellow outsider and new boy, Griffin, Rachel ends up sabotaging their budding relationship as well as her volunteer job because she’s a flawed, complicate and very emotional teenager.

 

I’d be interested in what my soon-to-be 13yo daughter would think of straydog (note to self: I have put the little paperback in her bookshelf).  She may find it a bit ordinary and too real at this stage in her life, but maybe this is something she'd appreciate more in a year or so...