The Midnight Library, Matt Haig, 2020

Rating: 4/5

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

A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson, 2003

Rating: 4/5

This is a book that discusses the formation of the universe, the determination of earth’s size and age, the role of physics and chemistry in enhancing our knowledge of the universe, volcanoes and glaciers, genetics and anthropology — in short, as Bryson puts it, “how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us.

This book addresses an amazing range of scientific topics and is a sort of cheat sheet on them. As Bryson puts it, “we live in a universe whose age we can’t compute, surrounded by stars whose distances from us and each other we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand” — in this book, he attempts to address some of this ignorance.  And incredibly, he does it with some humour along the way!

As with any Bryson book, there are several interesting tidbits strewn on the way. For example, if the diagram of our solar system in our school geography books were drawn to scale, and if Earth was pea-sized in that diagram, Pluto would have been two and a half kilometres away! Or when we sit on a chair, we are actually levitating (albeit at a height of only one hundred millionth of a cm. Or that the origin of the phrase “cloud nine” comes from an old classification of clouds into ten types in which the ninth type was the fluffiest cloud. The book is filled with large numbers and Bryson finds interesting ways of presenting them. For example, the earth is 4,500 billion years old, or put another way, if the entire history of the Earth was a day, humans emerge only one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. On a lighter note, I managed to deduce that the movements of Harry Potter’s Knight Bus may have been an application of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity!

As to be expected in a book of this genre, there are parts that drag. And given the 500+page length of the book, it may make sense to skim over a few parts. Also, Bryson often dumbs down the science for us. This may be a good thing or a bad one — it could irritate more knowledgeable readers but then, this book is probably not meant for them.

This book helped me revisit parts of the physics, biology and chemistry that I had learnt in high school. Ultimately, It’s a book that makes readers marvel anew at the size of the universe and allows them to look at things around them in a new way — Bryson’s senses of wonder is contagious. And for that, it’s worth a read!

Interesting factoid: Mary Anning used to gather fossils (including the ichthysorausus) and sell them and is most likely the source of the tongue twister “she sells sea-shells on the seashore)!

Pros: Wide range of scientific stories, interesting tidbits and analogies

Cons: Drags at times