I joined a book club this year.
I’ve been a nonfiction reader my entire life. It’s not that I don’t love fiction—who doesn’t love fiction? It’s just that fiction feels unproductive. It feels like the equivalent of watching tv.
Book club felt productive though. We have monthly meetings by which we have to read our books. We have productive discussion about the book’s themes. We have community, which is certainly the most important part.
I could never have anticipated the love of fiction that has come from joining book club. I have not read like this since I was a kid on summer break trying to finish as many Babysitter’s Club books as possible.
It’s so much more than watching TV. It’s inspired me to write. It’s made me think about all the different ways culture and morals can be communicated in stories and how I can teach my kids the lessons I want them to learn by showing them—by telling them a story.
We went on vacation to the mountains recently with my parents and my aunt, and I made the executive decision that we would have a vacation book club. We decided on The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, and I could not be happier with our choice.
Haig’s writing is both elegant and easy to understand. He gives just the right amount of detail. I’m guilty of skipping entire paragraphs of flowery language, but I didn’t skip a single word of this novel.
The story is about Nora who has lost her will to live and finds herself in a sort of purgatory—a library between life and death. In this library, she can enter into the stories written in these books to see what kind of life she would have lived if she had made a single different choice. The options are endless, and they all leave Nora feeling unsatisfied.
While you can anticipate where the story is going to go, it is such a beautifully written and creative interpretation of the human condition.
10/10 would recommend.