Socratica Reads Episode 20: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Kimberly Hatch Harrison (co-founder of Socratica) created this podcast to share her love of reading and to help others find their way back to reading, or to develop a new habit. In this episode, Kim gets around to reading something off her TBR list: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. She didn’t love it, but that’s okay. You don’t have to love every book to love reading. There’s still something interesting to be had when you figure out WHY you don’t love a book. 

You can get your copy here (and decide for yourself):

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

https://amzn.to/45RBsiS

Kim’s book: How to Be a Great Student

ebook: https://amzn.to/2Lh3XSP

Paperback: https://amzn.to/3t5jeH3

Kindle Unlimited: https://amzn.to/3atr8TJ

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Transcript:

Welcome Everybody! To Socratica Reads. My name is Kimberly Hatch Harrison, and I’m the co-founder of Socratica. We make futuristic videos about math, science, and computer programming. This podcast is all about how reading inspires the work we do. But it’s also about how great books connect us with the ideas people have around the world, not just now, but in the past AND the future. 

One topic that’s like CATNIP to any STEM kid is: The Multiverse. Parallel lives. Every time you make a choice: strawberry or chocolate—you split off another life. How different would our lives be if we had made different choices along the way?

So today’s book on this topic has been on my TBR (To Be Read) list for a while now—The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. It’s one of those books you see on the shelf of recommendations at your local bookstore, and your friends have all read it, and the LA Public Library keeps offering it to me on my ebook app (available now for a quick 7 day loan) so I finally gave in and read it. 

Socratica Friends, I did not like it. 

But just because you don’t like a book, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it. It’s fun to share your enthusiasm for a book that really works, but it’s also interesting to figure out WHY a book doesn’t work. So what happened here?

As soon as the premise became clear I was into it. There’s a library you might get a chance to visit at the moment when you straddle life and death. When you open a book from this library, you are allowed to see the roads not taken.

This is a story I want to read. I want to know if the main character already knows about the choices she made that changed her life, or were there small things she didn’t realize she could have done differently. But you know, we need to care about the protagonist. We need to understand them, and feel something for them. We don’t have to love them. We might be frustrated by them, or annoyed by them, or even hate them.

I feel nothing. The protagonist, Nora, doesn’t make any kind of sense to me. She’s not a real person.

A writer is a Creator, in the truest sense of the word. They have the power to Create living, breathing, thinking people who continue to live in our minds long after we close the book. Tell me Elizabeth Bennett isn’t a real...