DNF'd on: August 31st, 2023
DNF'd at: Page 192 (67%)

While I found the beginning of The Midnight Library engaging Matt Haig quickly fell into a brand of deeply predictable saccharine storytelling that grated on me so intensely I eventually had to DNF it. The book tried way too hard to be "life affirming" by plugging in overused tropes and twee aphorism about the way to life a happy life that rather than move me had me rolling my eyes.

I knew I had completely checked out of the story when I started spending more time contemplating Haig's worldbuilding logic rather than being immersed in the story itself. I found the mechanics of stepping into the lives of alternate versions of yourself in The Midnight Library unsettling. I don't care what the book says Nora's alternate lives were materially different people to her, so it was pretty fucked up that she puppeted their bodies without care or contemplation about the consequences her choices would have on the people that would have to live those lives after she inhabited them. For example sleeping with someone in someone else's body is a violation of consent to me. But the fact that I fixated on these mechanics rather that the narrative  as I was reading this book indicated that I really wasn't moved by the overall project of the story.

As someone who has struggled deeply with depression I don't find stories like The Midnight Library all that successful in telling stories about "overcoming" mental illness. The book is a bland exciserise in demonstrating "the grass is greener on the other side" and other oversaid cliches mentally ill people are told. But what really got me about this book was how unoriginal every beat of the story was. It honestly felt like the literary equivalent of a "hang in there" cat poster in its trite twee-ness. I know so many people who really like this book but I just couldn't push through it.