Answers to Go
Q. I recently read the book The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. Could you recommend some other books like it?
“The Midnight A. Library” has been very popular since its publication last year. In this enchanting novel, there is a library containing an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you might have lived had you made different choices at some point in your life. While we wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Met with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
One book you might enjoy is “Oona Out of Order” by Margarita Montimore. This inventive novel explores what it means to live a life fully in the moment, even if those moments are out of order. It's New Year's Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight, she will turn 19, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence. As the countdown begins, Oona faints and awakens 32 years in the future in her 51-year-old body. Greeted by a friendly stranger in a beautiful house she's told is her own, Oona learns that with each passing year she will leap to another age at random.
From jumping to different years of her life to living alternate versions of her life, the heroines in these heartwarming stories discover that the secret to a happy life isn't necessarily what they imagined.
Another similar book is “The Binding” by Bridget Collins. Books are dangerous things in Collins's alternate universe, a place vaguely reminiscent of 19thcentury England. It's a world in which people visit book binders to rid themselves of painful or treacherous memories. Once their stories have been told, they are bound between the pages of a book, and the slate is wiped clean. Their memories lose the power to hurt or haunt them. After suffering a mental collapse and no longer able to sustain his farm chores, Emmett Farmer is sent to the workshop of one such binder to live and work as an apprentice. Leaving home and family behind, Emmett slowly regains his health while learning the binding trade.
If the aspect of storytelling and the importance of books draws you to novels like “The Midnight Library,” then “The Binding” will be the perfect next read for you.
Another read-alike suggestion is “Or What You Will” by Jo Walton. The unnamed protagonist has been too many things to count. He has been a dragon with a boy on his back. He has been a scholar, a warrior, a lover, and a thief. He has been a god. But “he” is in fact nothing more than a spark of idea, a character in the mind of Sylvia Harrison, 73, award-winning author of thirty novels over forty years. He has played a part in most of those novels, and in the recesses of her mind, Sylvia has conversed with him for years. But Sylvia won't live forever, and when she dies, so will he. Now Sylvia is starting a new novel, a fantasy for adult readers. Of course, he's got a part in it. But he also has a notion. He thinks he knows how he and Sylvia can step off the wheel of mortality altogether. All he has to do is convince her.
Both of these engaging novels star a protagonist attempting to re-write their own story, while navigating the boundary between life and death.
For more book recommendations, call or email the library at 512-393-8200 or smpl@sanmarcostx.gov.
