Book of regrets

Something nice happened yesterday. I finished the book  - Death interrupted after a very long time.

Which means I can start yet another book "Midnight library" by Matt Haig. 

Like the previous book, this too has an unique - nonreal setting. If we could select alternate lives, any one of them, and live that life,  will we feel happier and more peaceful? Or that life too was just a beautiful unreal imagination, and flawful? In which case why do we keep regretting the choice which stopped us from having that life? 

That is what the book tries to decipher. Nora is an thirty five year old lonely woman who lives with her cat Voltaire. She could have been a scientist, an Olympic swimmer, a musician in a band, a glaciologist, a happily married wife with a loving husband and their own bar in peaceful rural England. But instead she just works in a music shop called String theory as an assistant. So of course she is full of regrets. Of hundreds of them. 

She is politely asked to leave even this petty job, so much beneath her capacities because her depressed appearance discourages the few visitors who come to the shop. Then her music pupil is leaving the class. And the last straw which breaks the camel's back is her cat dies in the middle of the road. 

She decides to call it quits - she can't hold on to anything. She can't even take care of a cat. She has nothing worth living for. And she takes an overdose of pills.

But instead of meeting Saint Peter at the pearly gates or Chitragupta (Hindu equivalent) waiting for her, she meets her school teacher Mrs. Elm and some kind of strange library without any walls. Filled with large cupboards of green books. And Mrs. Elm explains to her that all these books are stories of her alternate lives. 

And now, as she is between life and death, she can select any of these lives and live it. Enter that life. 

She does that only to realize that how wrong she was to regret for decision which would would have led her to a life much worse than the one she has lead.