The sixth book of 2022, by Matt Haig, translated by Noh Jin-seon. Would I ever have thought to read this book if not for the reading group? This book, which I came across by chance, made it clear right from opening it why it became a bestseller. It is written simply, yet it is insightful and raises issues worth pondering through its story.
The protagonist Nora is depressed. The many dreams she had as a child now seem so far away, and her loneliness, emptiness, depression, and the thought that she is an unnecessary being eventually lead her to choose death. The place where she opens her eyes again is a strange library, and there she meets the Books of Regrets, makes different choices at the decisive moments of her life, and lives out different lives. She thought that with a different choice she would have lived a far happier life, but even in the lives of different choices she is not happy.
Everyone has had the thought, "How wonderful it would have been if I had done that back then." Regret is endless. Regret makes us waste time and clouds our present life even more. (In this book it says, "It is this very regret that withers us and shrivels us up, and makes us feel like enemies to ourselves and to others.") We cannot actually go back and live again like Nora, but through her story the book tells us not to envy other lives or to grow depressed regretting the roads not taken, and that changing small things in the present is the way to create the future we dreamed of.
Hope and potential are what shine in the dark and what can change the present. Let us live the present.. and if we can, joyfully. So that the Books of Regrets in my own library no longer make me curious.