OMG, I'm finally done! What a monotonous journey that was. I won't rehash what so many others have eloquently stated. But one thing I have to mention is a phrase that's been stuck in my head for days. Last week, I found myself picking up "Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1)" by Connie Willis again, just to put it behind me. So, there I am, reading (okay, skimming) this book that some call "Best time-travel novel I've ever read!" or "a study of people's behavior." What behavior? All the charac...

This was unbelievably good!! I'm absolutely hooked and need to get my hands on the rest of the books in the series!



Mel 🖤🐶🐺🐾 [SEO Keywords: book review, Connie Willis, Doomsday Book]

A quote from courageous young Kivrin, the medievalist who travels back in time where she lives among villagers in 14th century English: “I wanted to come, and if I hadn’t, they would have been all alone, and nobody would have ever known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were.”Doomsday Book, republished as part of the SF Masterworks series by the American author Connie Willis is an amazing, unique, captivating 600-page novel taking place in two times concurrently: near-future Oxford...

The Middle Ages are the shady back alley of history. They're like that juvenile delinquent that all the 'proper' historical eras give the side-eye. “Life expectancy in 1300 was thirty-eight years,” he had told her when she first said she wanted to go to the Middle Ages, “and you only lived that long if you survived cholera and smallpox and blood poisoning, and if you didn’t eat rotten meat or drink polluted water or get trampled by a horse. Or get burned at the stake for witchcraft.” And yet, ...

This is my second time reading it. The first time I read *Doomsday Book* by Connie Willis, I was fascinated by Willis's take on time travel and the mirroring of the plague in the future with the past's Black Death. But more than that, the characters just crept up on me and ripped my soul to shreds. It was, quite possibly, the best time-travel novel I'd ever read.That was then.But now? Even knowing what was coming, even trying not to fall in love with all these characters, both in the past and th...

So, what exactly was the point of this almost 600-page novel, Doomsday Book by Connie Willis? That people can be incredibly annoying and repetitious? That the Black Death kills? I can't believe I wasted so many hours reading this flabby, irritating nonsense. I could have been spending time with friends, exercising, or taking naps... or reading a different book. The entire thing is a monument to wasted time – my time, the characters' time, and the five years it took to write this extravagantly dr...

Christmas 2010: I realized I was stuck in a rut. I kept re-reading old favorites, just waiting for a few trusted authors to put out something new. Something had to give. On a whim, I challenged myself to read every book that had won the Locus Sci-Fi Award. That's 35 books, 6 of which I'd already read, leaving 29 titles by 14 authors who were new to me. While working through this list, I got married, went on my honeymoon, changed careers, and became a dad. So these stories are imprinted on my m...

Somehow, by the year 2053, we'll have invented time travel but lost the use of cell phone technology. You'd think that was a pretty good trade-off, right? Well, if you've read a few of Connie Willis' "future historian" time travel books, you know that we're probably better off as we are, because without cell phones, it seems humanity would spend most of its days in fevered attempts to place calls by landline video phone, narrowly missing one another, encountering busy circuits, unable to locate ...

I finished *Doomsday Book* this morning and immediately jumped into the next book on my to-read list, which happens to be *Hyperion* by Dan Simmons. *Doomsday Book* left me a bit of a mess, mentally, and I wanted to replace the imagery and train of thought with something new. I figured I'd have to let *Doomsday Book* simmer in my head for a while before I could write a decent review. I figured the same about Iain Banks' *Transition*, another book I recently finished. So, my plan was to read *Hyp...

What I find most infuriating about Connie Willis's *Doomsday Book* is the sheer lack of editing. Half the novel is just characters freaking out on the phone about other phone calls, about other people's conversations, about people getting on and off trains who are... honestly, who even cares? Willis demonstrates a complete absence of perspective, no talent for crafting a single evocative detail. The result? A monumental testament to boredom. And this is on top of the completely unbelievable idea...