On Our Nightstand: Among the Stacks
If I had to create a Top 10 list of places I love, libraries and bookstores would absolutely make the cut. Given the role that libraries and bookstores play in getting people to fall in love with books and reading, it seems only appropriate that books set in these locales have become their own subset of fiction. Here are just a few of my recent favorites
The Midnight Library
by Matt Haig, Penguin Books, 304 pages
Nora Seed is a young woman who is unhappy about her life and the choices she’s made; so unhappy, in fact, that one night she decides it’s time to end it. But rather than die, she lands in the Midnight Library. The library is a place between life and death where Nora is able to select certain books about her life and go back in time to relive key moments when making a different choice would have taken her down a different path. What would have happened, for instance, if she had continued competitive swimming? Or gone to Australia with her best friend, Izzy? The library is managed by Mrs. Elm, Nora’s childhood librarian and someone who was always there for her when she was growing up. In other words, she’s the perfect person to help Nora understand the trips she’s taking and nudge her toward a better understanding of the choices she’s made and why.
While it sounds like it could be depressing, The Midnight Library ultimately is a book celebrating life in all its messiness. Nora realizes that while not perfect, her life as it’s played out actually is one of consequence and meaning — that it, and she, are worthy. She also realizes that she doesn’t actually want to die and takes steps to ensure she lives.
We all have our what-if moments. The Midnight Library is a reminder that no decision is necessarily perfect and that even the ones we don’t make can make our lives rich, rewarding and meaningful.
The Lost Bookshop
by Evie Woods, Harper Collins, 448 pages
If you’re a fan of historical fiction with a bit of romance and magical realism tossed in for good measure, you’ll likely eat up The Lost Bookshop. Set in Dublin in the 1920s, the story revolves around three main characters: Martha, who comes to Dublin looking for a different life and becomes a housekeeper for an odd, elderly woman, an arrangement that includes living quarters; Henry, who comes to Dublin, also escaping his life, trying to figure out a piece of his past; and Opaline, who escapes a marriage arranged by her evil brother by fleeing to Paris. All three of these people are unknowingly tied together, which we learn as their stories unfold over time and they discover a bookshop with extraordinary powers.
The Lost Bookshop is both a mystery about a hidden manuscript (and a vanishing bookstore) and a love story. It is a story about the power of books to change lives (do you see a mini-theme here?) and remind us of what matters
The Sentence
by Louise Erdrich, Harper Perennial, 400 pages
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louise Erdrich (The Night Watchman) set The Sentence, at least in part, in a bookstore that is haunted by the store’s formerly most annoying and yet loyal customer, Flora. Desperate to atone for the behaviors of her white logging ancestors, Flora yearns to identify as an Indigenous person. Her ghostly visits to the store especially affect Tookie, a feisty Native American who only recently started working at the bookstore after spending some time in prison, where books and reading were part of how she remained sane. Tookie wants to solve this mystery and end the haunting, which begins — and ultimately ends — on All Souls’ Day, appropriately.
Set in Minneapolis in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown and in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, this book is more family drama with the bookstore playing a secondary role than the other two books here. And yet, the bookstore setting, a place where we discover stories and, often, discover ourselves and/or the truth, seems especially apt. We are all, after all, haunted by our histories, whether collective or individual.
