The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

 Nora is having a very bad day.  She loses her loser job, and her cat dies. She decides there is no reason to go on living, so she takes an overdose, and ends up in the Midnight Library.  It is a library full of books, each of which is a different version of her life if she had made different decisions in her life. She can visit the different versions of her life and stay as long as she likes.  As she starts to life hop, she discovers that many of her regrets were not well founded.  

I don't know if I am even allowed to blog about this book because I didn't get through it.  I made it about half of the way through, but I found myself dreading hearing the next chapter (I was listening to the audiobook version) and I thought to myself, "I have so many other books I would probably like more than this one, so I will just quit."  I originally put the book on hold because it has in the top five most requested books on Overdrive lately.  I could see why some people could like it.  It was probably comforting to people with lots of regrets.  The message seemed to be that even if your life sucks now, it probably wouldn't have been much better no matter what you did.  Actually, that is overly harsh.  Nora is learning valuable life lessons with each life she experiences, and I have confidence she will finish the book in a much better place emotionally.  The reason I stopped reading it was that each chapter is like a nightmare.  She finds herself suddenly in a situation where she is expected to know things and be able to do things she doesn't know or isn't able to do.  In one life she arrives right before she is supposed to give a talk to thousands of people.  In another she is supposed to sing in a rock band but doesn't know the song.  It made me feel so stressed for her, it wasn't enjoyable to read. I was tempted to just jump ahead to the ending, but I am not that kind of reader. 

So if you make it to the end, and it turns out to have such a wonderful ending it is worth slogging through the nightmare chapters, please let me know.  (304 p. 2020)