The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Published 2020 · 316 pages · 73,529 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Fantasy, Literary Fiction
How hard is The Midnight Library to read?
The Midnight Library scores 27 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 22 out of 100
- Haig writes in plain, everyday English with no specialist vocabulary. Words like 'glaciologist' appear briefly but are never dwelt on. The prose is designed to be frictionless for a broad audience, including readers who rarely pick up literary fiction.
- Sentence structure: 20 out of 100
- Sentences are short and declarative throughout. Haig favours clarity over rhythm or complexity — chapters rarely exceed a few pages and paragraph breaks come frequently. There is no subordinate-clause nesting or grammatical experimentation of any kind.
- Abstraction: 38 out of 100
- The novel gestures at philosophical ideas — regret, counterfactual lives, the will to live — but consistently anchors them in concrete images: specific careers, specific relationships, a cat named Voltaire. Abstract arguments are always incarnated in a scene Nora can walk through.
- Information density: 27 out of 100
- Each chapter is brief and dwells on one scenario. Facts, cultural references, and ideas arrive at a conversational pace with no stacking or compression. Readers are given ample space between new concepts.
- Narrative indirection: 32 out of 100
- The parallel-lives structure means the story visits a fresh scenario every few chapters, which creates mild disorientation. But the narrator is consistently reliable and the authorial hand keeps each transition clearly legible. There is no fragmented timeline or withheld perspective.
- Symbolic density: 40 out of 100
- The library itself is a sustained and prominent metaphor — each book on its shelves is a life Nora could have lived. Chess imagery runs through her relationship with Mrs. Elm. These symbols are explicit and explained within the text rather than left for the reader to excavate.
- Ironic distance: 14 out of 100
- The novel is earnest and sincere throughout. Haig's authorial voice makes no distance between surface meaning and intended meaning — the moral is stated plainly in the final chapters. There is no irony between what is said and what is meant.
- Resolution withholding: 14 out of 100
- The novel ends with a clear, hopeful resolution: Nora chooses her original life and resolves to live it differently. No questions are left unanswered, no ambiguity is cultivated. The reader is meant to leave satisfied and reassured.
- Structural complexity: 33 out of 100
- The parallel-life chapter structure gives the novel some formal variety — each life is a self-contained vignette — but this device is established early and executed consistently. It is not nonlinear, nested, or experimental; the frame narrative never becomes disorienting.
How The Midnight Library is regarded
The Midnight Library holds a literary regard score of 31 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.