If you want to get a taste of Soren’s experience for yourself, you can try this website, which simulates the Library of Babel. It’s fun to click around a few times or even search for specific strings, but the novelty quickly runs out when one is just faced with endless gibberish. So at least for me, this helped convey that overwhelming sense of hopelessness that Soren felt.

The reason I love this book is that the author did a fantastic job of making the reader experience the trajectory of Soren’s emotional arc for themselves. Because when you start reading the book, you probably have a similar reaction to some of the tenants in the library—eternity with all the books ever written doesn’t sound too bad, eh? They can eat whatever they want, frolic around doing whatever they want. Besides the violent cult, it is a very peaceful existence.

But after a while, as Soren himself starts to grow numb, you do start to viscerally feel that sense of dread from the eternal uniformity of it all. You really, really feel that vastness and endlessness of the library. And yet, even then, I personally felt some glimmer of hope, because you know that even though the library is practically endless, it still has to end somewhere.

And Soren, too, felt that way. But then he meets that mathematician who calculated the size of the library, and who hammers in the point by making comparisons to things like the number of atoms in the universe and the size in light-years. If you hadn’t already calculated the numbers for yourself (I had not), that moment hits extremely hard. It is just delivered in such a brutally cold way that shatters any remaining sense of hope.

And then afterwards, as Soren reflects on how Hell is just relentless uniformity for all of eternity, he drops one of my favorite passages of all time:

But somehow I feared the defining point of this Hell was its unrelenting uniformity, its lack of variation from type. If there was a heaven at the end of this, it must be filled with great variety, perhaps a multiplicity of intelligent species spread across universes. Yes, heaven would be as full of difference as Hell was of sameness.

I thought of the mountains and forests I remembered from my life as I climbed. I thought of the intricate structure of an ant’s cuticle. How delicate the song of a bird, nestled in the twisted branches of a towering pine, sounds spilling into the cool morning. I thought of the zippered feathers of a sparrow and is patterned colors, the banded mottling of its breast, its tiny feet curled round the rough brown bark, cracked and furrowed, giving purchase to those tiny clawed feet. What I would have given even to see a cockroach in this place. It would be heralded as a treasure that could not be purchased with a king’s ransom. To see its six legs splaying from its thorax would have been a sight worth waiting for in a line a thousand years long. Songs would be written about it delicate multi-segmented antennae. Its wings would have inspired such poetry as to make people weep for decades at its telling.

But here, deep in Hell, there was nothing to match such a wonder. Such splashes of variegation were denied us. Our attempts at music were nothing but a shadow of what we enjoyed on earth, but even more than music, we missed the natural sounds. The woosh of wind through the yellowing leaves of an oak on a cool day late in fall. The splashing of water over smooth stone in a tiny creek as it made its way down a steep mountain. Even the whistle of a train, or the creaming of a truck down the highway would have seemed like a symphony.

This sudden ode to life is like a window inside the hellish library that taunts you with its view of Earth, a suddenly bright vision in contrast to the dull library we have spent the past hundred pages on. That yearning for the world Soren cannot return to is very powerful when you know that it’s not just a lifetime of yearning—it’s eternities and eternities and eternities of wishing you could experience just a single moment from your old life.

Somehow, this passage made me viscerally feel that powerful sense of longing and yearning for Earth. That feels silly to say, given that I am indeed still on Earth—but ultimately, this book did change the way I look at even the most mundane things. Something about this passage just made me suddenly feel and recognize the beauty of the world around me.

Aside from evoking those powerful feelings of dread and yearning, the author also explored a range of interesting ideas through the library patrons’ experiences. How do people go on when they have lost so many integral parts of themselves—their dreams, anything they were building towards in the future, their loved ones? What happens psychologically when all structure and previous sense of morality are stripped away? How do people use ritual and religion to try to find meaning in their existence? How does love give its own meaning to life—and in what ways does it not, after an eternity of knowing the other person?

I also found the end of the book to be unexpected and perhaps a bit abrupt. For some reason, when I started the book, I had assumed Soren would get out by the end. But surprisingly, I didn’t find that ending depressing. I actually found it somewhat inspiring. Because despite what he’s been through, despite the knowledge that he will functionally never escape the library, Soren himself still feels that hope for something up there to be recognizing him and his efforts, and he still persists. After everything, he keeps going.