The book you should read before 2024 ends.
Especially, if your life is full of regrets.
I think I was supposed to read this book. First, one of my favorite professors from METU recommended it, and then I received a message about it from a follower on social media. As soon as I shared this book on Instagram, I received lots of messages about how good it was. I guess I was late to the game. This book was published in 2020, and only in 4 years, more than 10 million copies were sold. I just finished reading this book, and I understand the reason.
Yes, I am talking about “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig.1 This book is one of the best fiction books I have ever read. It is fiction, but one can also categorize it as a self-help book because it definitely gives practical guidance if your heart is open enough to see it.
You should read this book if you think:
Your life is full of regret.
You could have achieved more in life.
You missed the important opportunities in the past.
You want to live a different life.
Or you just want to read a novel that makes you excited for the evenings because it is time to read this book.
I want to share the parts that I highlighted while reading this book, not only to encourage you to read this book but also to remind these messages to myself when I feel a bit lost in my life.
“Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes. But I stand by what I said. It was a good choice. It wasn’t a desired outcome.”
“Nora had always had a problem accepting herself. From as far back as she could remember, she’d had the sense that she wasn’t enough. Her parents, who both had their own insecurities, had encouraged that idea.”
“But maybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths.”
“You don’t have to understand the life. You just have to live it.”
“You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.”
“Never underestimate the big importance of small things, Mrs Elm had said. You must always remember that.”
“Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations…”
“She didn’t need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn’t even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential.”
“It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.”
“And it was different because she no longer felt she was there simply to serve the dreams of other people. She no longer felt like she had to find sole fulfilment as some imaginary perfect daughter or sister or partner or wife or mother or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself.”
“She would see her own hurt, recognise it, and not imagine there was a life of unquestionable positivity and happiness she was being deprived from.”
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. And her perspective was now open to uncertainty. And where there was uncertainty there was also possibility, whatever the present looked like.”
Enjoy the read!
Cheers,
Sidika
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