Reading trees are usually for paid subscribers. I’m opening this one up to everyone so you can see what they are.
Every book I love hands me the next one. That is the whole idea behind this Substack, and it is why I keep saying I don’t have a shelf yet. I have a map. A reading tree is that map drawn out for one thread of my reading: the book that started it, every book it sent me to, and why.
This is my first one, and it runs back further than I knew. I thought it started with Addie LaRue this spring. When I lined my reading up by date, the first book on this theme turned out to be one I read in November 2020, and I have been chasing the same feeling ever since without noticing. Ten books, all about second chances and the lives we don’t get to live.
The root is the first book I read. From there the tree splits three ways. On the left are books where the second chance is a place you walk into, and on the right are books where it happens inside a life. Up the middle are books where love carries across lifetimes. The buds at the tips are books I haven’t read yet. They’re moving up my TBR, and I’ll add each one to the tree once I’ve read and rated it.
Where it started: the root
In Five Years by Rebecca Serle
Dannie Kohan is a lawyer who plans everything, down to the year she’ll get engaged. The night it finally happens, she falls asleep and wakes up in a different apartment, next to a different man, five years in the future. An hour later she’s back in her own life, and she spends the next five years trying to make sure that future never comes true. The book turns out to be about something else entirely, and I won’t spoil what.
This book had me remembering decisions I made early on in my life and relationship and really hit a nerve with how just living one hour in a potential future can make you change course.
Rating: 3 stars
The left limb: a place you walk into
Every book on this limb hands its characters a second chance through a room. Two libraries and one café chair, and the other life is waiting on the other side as long as you’re willing to walk in. They are clever, and they are easy to love as ideas. They just never got under my skin the way the books on the other side of the tree did, and it took me until this year to notice.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Nora Seed has hit the lowest point of her life, and instead of an ending she finds herself in a library that exists between life and death. Every book on its shelves is a version of her life that would have played out if she had made one choice differently, and she gets to try them on, one after another, looking for the one worth staying in.
I read it in December 2022, gave it three stars and never even wrote a review. Looking back, I liked the idea more than I felt it. Nora gets to step in and out of lives like trying on coats, and I admired that from a distance without ever really aching for her.
Rating: 3 stars
The Astral Library by Kate Quinn
Alix Watson grew up in foster care with one steady truth, that books never let her down the way people did. One night in the Boston Public Library she slips through a hidden door into a library where the lost can escape into their favorite stories while time in the real world stops. From there it becomes a chase through Jane Austen’s drawing rooms, Sherlock Holmes’s back alleys and the parties of The Great Gatsby.
Kate Quinn is an auto-read author for me, so nothing on this tree sent me to it, and it still landed right on this limb. I loved how much this book loves libraries, even if it never moved me the way I wanted it to. It also turned into an essay about wishing I could bookmark my own life and step back into one moment as the person I am now.
Rating: 3 stars
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
In a tiny basement café in Tokyo, one particular seat will carry you back in time. The rules are strict. You can’t leave the seat, nothing you do will change the present, and you have to come back before your coffee gets cold. The book follows four people who decide it’s worth it anyway.
It was one of my September library ebooks, and it wasn’t for me. If the premise pulls you in, it’s short and worth a try. It’s also the third book on this limb to hand someone a second chance through a place you walk into, and the third to land at three stars or lower.
Rating: 2 stars
The right limb: inside a life
On this side of the tree there is no door. The other life happens inside the one you’re already living, through a husband who comes home after everyone thought he was gone, one small choice that splits a life in two, or a box on your doorstep that tells you how long you have. Nobody gets to step out of anything. They just have to live with it, and every book on this limb was five stars for me.
One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Emma Blair marries her high school sweetheart, and on their first anniversary his helicopter goes down over the Pacific. Years later she has rebuilt her life and is engaged to someone new when her husband is found alive. Now she has to choose between the love she lost and the love she built.
This is where my Taylor Jenkins Reid run started in April 2023, and I went straight from one of hers to the next. It’s gut-wrenching in the quietest way. I can’t imagine losing the love of your life, doing the painful work of rebuilding, and then having that person come back. The book never pretends there is an easy answer, and it understands that love can be real in more than one season of a life.
Rating: 5 stars
Maybe in Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Hannah Martin moves home to Los Angeles at twenty-nine with no real plan. At a bar on her first night back, her best friend asks if she’s ready to go, and her high school ex offers to drive her home later. The book splits right there and tells both versions of her life side by side.
I couldn’t get through it fast enough. I’d finish a chapter already itching to see what was happening in the other version of her life. It captures those sliding-door moments we all have, the small decisions that quietly set the course of everything, without ever feeling gimmicky.
Rating: 5 stars
The Measure by Nikki Erlick
One ordinary morning, every adult in the world wakes up to a small wooden box with a string inside, and the length of the string tells you how long you will live. The book follows a handful of people with long strings and short ones as the whole world reorganizes itself around something nobody asked to know.
I listened to this one in September 2025, and it quietly took over my inner life. I kept pausing to think about my own life, the people I love and the risks I do or don’t take. It’s one of my top reads of 2025 and one of my all-time favorites, but I still don’t know if I’d open my box.
Rating: 5 stars
Up the middle: across lifetimes
The center limb is love that refuses to stay in one lifetime. A curse that lets you live forever without being remembered, two souls who find each other again in every new life, and two agents writing letters across time. It is also the only limb where one book actually handed me the next, which is why it grows straight up the middle of the tree.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
In 1714 France, Addie LaRue makes a desperate bargain to escape the life that has been chosen for her. She gets to live forever, but everyone she meets forgets her the moment she is out of sight. For three hundred years she can’t leave a mark on anyone, until she walks into a bookstore in New York and meets someone who remembers her name.
I came to V.E. Schwab embarrassingly late, after hundreds of other authors, and I listened to this one on audio in February. It’s a love story you feel in your gut more than your head, and the pain settles into you slowly and doesn’t leave. I wanted to keep living inside it day after day, which is exactly the right way to feel about this book.
Rating: 5 stars
Our Infinite Fates by Laura Steven
Evelyn remembers every one of her past lives, and in every one of them she has been killed before her eighteenth birthday by Arden, the soul tethered to hers. This time she has a little sister who needs her to stay alive, so she has to find a way to break the cycle.
It was marketed straight at people who loved Addie LaRue, and that is the only reason it ended up on my Kindle. These two have loved each other across centuries and killed each other in every lifetime, and that tension carries the whole book. It pulled an essay out of me about whether a soulmate would still be your soulmate if they came back in a body you weren’t attracted to.
If you missed that one: What If Your Soulmate Came Back in a Different Body?
Rating: 5 stars
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Red and Blue are agents on opposite sides of a war fought across time and parallel worlds. They start leaving each other taunting letters in the wreckage of each mission, and the letters slowly turn into something neither side can afford.
Because I loved Addie LaRue and Our Infinite Fates, I kept hearing that this had to be the next stop. I was chasing the same feeling, so I borrowed it from my library in August. It was not for me. I couldn’t get into the writing style and the opening never hooked me, and I know plenty of people love it. I am keeping it on the tree anyway. A tree where every branch is five stars would be a brochure, not a reading life, and this miss is the reason I went back and looked at everything else on this theme.
Rating: 2 stars
What my stars were trying to tell me
When I sorted these by how the second chance actually happens, my ratings sorted themselves. The Midnight Library, The Astral Library and Before the Coffee Gets Cold all hand you a second chance through a place you walk into, a library or a café seat, and all three landed at three stars or lower. The books where the other life happens inside a life, through a choice or a loss or a love that will not quit, were all fives. The one exception is the root. In Five Years happens inside a life and still only got three stars, even though it hit a nerve. I think it was the first time I’d read a story like this, and every book since has been me looking for the version that really lands.
I did not see that until I made this map, but my own review of The Astral Library had already said it. I felt the cleverness of the structure more than I felt Alix’s longing. When the second chance is a building, I end up admiring the building. When it lives inside a person, I feel it.
Time War is the one miss up the middle, and that one lost me on the writing style, not the idea.
Where it goes next
Five books on my Libby wishlist belong on this tree, and I haven’t read any of them yet. Now I want to see if the pattern holds.
The library is where I’d start too. If you’d rather own a copy, the title links go through Bookshop.org and support indie bookstores.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
In the early 1900s, January Scaller grows up in a mansion full of treasures her guardian collects from around the world, and one day she finds a book about doors that open into other worlds. Its pages start to explain her own past. This one belongs on the left limb, and by my own theory it should be a three, so I’m reading it partly to find out if I’m right about myself.
How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
Tom Hazard looks forty-one, but a rare condition has kept him alive for centuries. The one rule he’s been given is never to fall in love. Now he’s teaching history in London and trying to live an ordinary life, while every century he’s already lived keeps catching up with him. A love story stretched across lifetimes puts this one up the middle.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
A civil servant in near-future London takes a job helping people pulled out of the past adjust to modern life. Her assignment is a polar explorer from 1847, and the two fall into something neither of them expected while the ministry’s real purpose comes into focus. Love across time sends this one up the middle too.
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Ursula Todd is born on a snowy night in 1910 and dies before she can take a breath. Then she is born again, and again, living her life over and over through two world wars with each version changing a little. It’s one life lived many times, so it goes on the right limb.
Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister
Jen watches her teenage son stab a stranger outside their house. When she wakes up the next morning, it’s the day before, and then the day before that, and she keeps moving backward through time trying to find the moment it all started. Another life replayed from the inside, so it belongs on the right limb.
Why this one is free
Reading trees are the heart of what paid subscribers get, and normally you would only see the start of this one before the paywall. I opened up this first one so you can see what a tree actually is before you decide whether it is worth paying for.
Paid subscribers get a new reading tree every month and the full vault of past ones. Founding members also get one reading tree a year built just for them, around a book they choose.
What is a book you loved so much you went looking for the same feeling, and did the next one deliver?