I’ve been on a novel reading jag and have a trio of my recent faves to share with you.  In Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, Nora Seed hovers between life and death. Her life has less been lived, than regreted, every step of the way. “Every move had been a mistake, every decision a disaster, every day a retreat from who she’d imagined she’d be.” Nora pens her suicide note, chases the pills down with some wine and ends up not in the morgue but between life and death in the Midnight Library.

Nora is shown infinite shelves holding an infinite number of books, each one offering a different life for her to experience. “While the Midnight Library stands,” the librarian explains, “you will be preserved from death. Now you have to decide how you want to live.” 

Book after book, Nora lives the life of a rock star, a glaciologist, an Olympic swimmer, a cat sitter, thrice married, an aid worker in Botswana, and many more. Each life answers Nora’s question of who might she have been, but none can tell her which life is the best one.

Here are a couple of passages I marked. This is for my librarian friends: “Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places.  Like soul-enhanced search engines.” And then there is this one, “The art of swimming — [Nora] supposed like any art — was about purity. The more focussed you were on th activity, the less focussed you were on everything else. You kind of stopped being you and becamse the thing you were doing.” The same can be said for The Midnight Library.  You cease being the reader and become one with the author’s world. What an intriguiging world Haig offers us to live for a while.

Mary Lawson’s A Town Called Solace is sweet, satisfying and not a bit treacly or pat. Told through the voices of seven-year-old Clara, her elderly neighbor Mrs. Orchard, and the young stranger who moves into Mrs. Orchard’s house while the old woman is in the hospital, A Town Called Solace weaves together mystery, heartbreak and the shattering actions sorrow can compel us to take.

I’d never read anything by Louise Penny, but the recommendation was so effusive, I immediately put a library hold on The Madness of Crowds. I love mysteries and crime novels and Penny’s latest delivers 100%. But Madness is so much richer than a mere whodunit. Penny began writing the novel just as the pandemic began; the stresses and dilemmas Covid laid bare in our hospital systems figure prominently.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache has been charged with providing security for a lecture given by a visiting statistics professor. The seemingly simple assignment devolves into a near riot as the professor makes her case for euthanasia of those who are a drain on the medical system — the elderly, the disabled and the terminally ill. The debate ignited by the professor’s findings set the townspeople of Three Pines against one another. When a murder is committed, ghosts, secrets, and uneasy truths begin falling from the sky like the Christmas snows blanketing the town. 

While Penny deftly weaves the strands of the mystery toward the kind of ending you would expect from an award-winning, New York Times best-selling crime novelist, it’s her characters and their inner lives that have left me wanting to read other books in the series. The relationshp between Gamache and his son-in-law (and second-in-command) shifts between family tenderness and the stresses of their profession. A bevy of beautiful grandchldren, a gay couple who run the bistro and Ruth, a woman who treats the local bookstore as a lending library and never leaves the house without her F-word quacking duck clutched in her arms, make for the kind of ensemble that is pure delight.  And if that’s not enough, Louise Penny’s final pages of acknowledgments end on a note that lets me know the author would be a really fun person to hang out with.