E-book doomsday book

I don't know if it's a British thing, but he never "dials" a phone, he punches it. He punched numbers 31 times in the book. OOoh, and my personal favorite, Rummage. In the beginning of the book, one of the scientists waiting in the crying room has a "shopping bag," which is mentioned no less than 20 times in the first pages I never realized how describing something so irritating can be so irritating to read!

It's like the only way the author builds tension into a scene. She literally has someone talk at this character, then in response she rummages. But that's not all. This book, set in the future, spends much of it's time with busy signals. Yes, that's right, pull that memory out of the back of your mind, the most annoying sound in the world, brought back to life.

The book was written in , so, unfortunately the science fiction part wasn't her strong suit, apparently only masters like Gibson can get this one right The toilet paper and the grumpy guests. They are simply used as a device so that every time he calls this guy for info, these 2 problems will keep him from answering what he was supposed to answer, and then the call will end, with no one getting anywhere.

If you think I'm exaggerating, the guests are brought up 45 times, the toilet paper 17 times. I had more fun using the search feature than reading this, by the way. I feel some of the fight drifting out of me. My sister recommended this book, and I so wanted to like it so we could chat about it It aggravates me! From the beginning of the book, we know something went wrong about sending her back, but the guy who wants to tell you what happened gets sick By page , student girl finally figures out she must have been sent to the wrong time, and that's why her translator won't work.

By the end of the book you realize none of it matters, and the "6th Sense" twist of this book is They both just randomly got sick.

Yeah, spoiler. Nothing in the past came to the future or vice versa. It's just dumb luck, lots of people dead, a pedophilia type love hinted at, and no reason to have ever bothered writing this book. The "touching love story" or whatever people are calling it? While people in future-present are dying off all around him, the professor is still totally focused on the student that got sent back.

I think people think it's a love story that he's concerned about her welfare, despite everyone he know or loves being dead around him and that not seeming to sink in. There's no defined love story View all 37 comments. Shelves: plague-and-pestilence , the-missionary-position. We had the midth Century for that. These ain't Jesuits on a distant planet, or a man and a boy wandering down a road. This shit really happened, people. For me, this line is similar to the one I draw between literary fiction and science fiction, the latter genre which typically gets assigned an automatic Tier 2.

But Vonnegut and Atwood are definitely Tier 1, aren't they? Neither would self-select to the SF category and, I suspect, SF aficionados would not necessarily classify them there either. I'm not sure any of these authors would fit neatly within the confines of SF either, but they sure are more "science fiction-y" than my usual reading. And perhaps just because of the origins or order of their appearance on my to-read list, they are lumped into a triad in my head.

Yes, I confess, I'd probably classify each of them as Tier 2 writers: there is something perhaps a little too 'easy' about the writing; a little too straightforward. Nothing that makes you stop and need or even want to re-read to tease out the layers of meaning, the clever subtleties of language or the nuances of how style marries to substance. These books are not about the writing, which really means they are not about the author.

They are about the story. And I'm a sucker for a great story. This one pulled me in from page one and had me in its grip throughout all of the remaining pages.

I sacrificed sleep to read it, staying up late into the night. And, it made me cry. I was, in a word, engrossed. Like Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God , Willis uses science fiction devices space travel to first contact with alien species in Russell's series; time travel to Black Death-ridden England in in Willis's , but these are merely ways to get the main characters to a situation that forces them and their readers to examine the nature of humanity in the face of extreme crisis.

Russell focuses specifically on what it means to believe in a God that allows unimaginable suffering. Willis is concerned with this too, and includes a medieval priest to be sure the issue is raised, but she is a little more story-focused, and less about beating you over the head to make sure you get that point. Her characters feel more like characters, and less like symbols or vehicles conveying a theme. It helps, too, that Willis's characters are people anchored in a real past with whom we can connect not just intellectually and spiritually but also emotionally and some of us, genetically.

I think her central concern--the heart of this book--is not about questioning faith but about our capacity for compassion. Like her main character, time-travelling historian Kivrin, Willis seeks to link with a specific past and humanize it; like Kivrin, she wants to rescue the people of the Middle Ages from the negative reputation they've acquired, the modern disparaging judgement we've made against them for their filth, their narrow-minded worldview blinded by religion, their poor behaviour towards one another she weaves in the apocryphal stories historians of the modern age tell, of cutthroats and villains; witch-burners and pitchfork-armed gangs seeking someone to blame; parents abandoning their plague-sick children and cold-hearted priests fleeing, leaving their parishioners to suffer in agony.

Willis is making a judgement here about historians, too. She creates a character in her modern timeline, Gilchrist--as rigid and narrow-minded as any of the past and the closest this novel has to a villain--who claims the Black Death's mortality rate is much lower than commonly accepted.

This is a real dispute, as I have read, among medieval scholars: the death rate in England during the first plague ranges anywhere between Gilchrist is a mortality denier: the numbers weren't that high, therefore the horrors weren't that great. Kivrin, and Willis, seek to debunk this dangerous bit of historical myth-making. She brings the dispute over the numbers front and centre by repeating, at key intervals: a third to one-half of people died. Is it a third?

Is it half? It doesn't really matter, says Willis. What matters is that they were real people: "frightened and brave and irreplaceable" p. Only in retrospect, do I see how clever a writer she is that page sums it up, but you'll need to read all that goes before it : how well-developed and 'real' her characters became to me; and how she connected the present more or less, it's in the novel's present to the past with character, symbols and motifs.

The mirroring is beautifully subtle: a nagging mother in ; a nagging mother-in-law in A gaggle of bell-ringers practising Christmas carols; medieval church bells tolling for the dead. A pandemic in the 21st century echoing the Black Death of the fourteenth.

What she focuses on is the connections we have with one another, personally and societally, in the present; as well as the ones that link us to the past.

The epidemiology of love as well as disease. People are people in all ages, Kirvin and Willis believe. Narrow-minded, ignorant and cruel in the present as in the past; kind, compassionate and self-sacrificing, too. But all of that is my retrospective analysis, and none of it was on the surface as I was reading. I didn't have half an eye on how she was telling it, or what I was going to say in my Goodreads review.

She trumped all that by telling a great story, well-researched, well-written, with believable and convincing characters, a plot line that had real tension and a considerable amount of farce black humour amidst the Black Death. Sure, she telegraphs some of her plot twists, sometimes as a way of cushioning the blow.

There's some unnecessary repetition--a kind of backtracking from chapter to chapter that seemed redundant, and a tendency to switch from first-person to third-person that is sometimes disorienting, like time travel itself. Absolutely none of that got in the way of the incredible impact the story had on me.

Let's hear it for Tier 2 writers. View all 58 comments. That's a quote from the only character I truly liked in this book. My first Connie Willis book. And I must admit that there is no denying the quality. At all. But more of that later. Since this book was written some time ago, there are no cell phones or laptops, but the telephones are some form of FaceTime the way they were described. A Apocalyptic! One undergraduate student is to go back to the Middle Ages to study the people there for about a week.

She has been preparing for this for the past 2 or 3 years. The day finally comes and, of course, something goes wrong. Without giving too much away, people start getting sick here, too, and nobody is putting one and one together; or they do, but only slowly. There are many parallels between the two timelines, which I took for the author's way of demonstrating that we have not come as far as we think.

Some of the people are too rigid when it comes to unnecessary rules while others endanger other people by not taking anything seriously. Not to mention that sickness can strike us down no matter how much penicillin we have. In the same vein, the book also makes a very interesting point about academia vs being in the field - theoretical knowledge like statistics on how many people have died from the plague vs actually living through an epidemic.

It also nicely illustrated that modern people don't know suffering on such a scale. Theory-vs-reality was something that really irked me about Kivrin.

She was just too naive. A bit can be explained away by her youth and inexperience but not that much. Well, she learned her lesson. So many times I actually screamed in frustration because nothing ever got done or "experts" were very slow to catch on to something and it felt like we were treading water despite only a week having passed within the story.

In either timeline. On the contrary, I felt a very dark satisfaction about a number of the people dying horribly like Lady Imeyne or those clergy men. However, what I very much appreciate is the amount of research the author must have done for this book and the details she added into the story to make it more realistic. Be it about the procedures in case of an epidemic nowadays or back in the 90s when this book was written, a few things have changed by now or the fact that a plague meant animals not getting fed, cows being in pain because there was nobody to milk them etc.

It shows us a richly drawn up world and rewards readers with a fully fleshed-out world to step into. And this is what made reading the book interesting despite me not connecting to the people.

I was there for the history, the research so to speak, and there were a lot of details to marvel at. View all 28 comments. Dec 06, Matthew rated it liked it Shelves: , historical-fiction , own , sci-fi , completist-book-club , buddy-read. In hindsight, maybe this wasn't the best book content-wise to get over pandemic caused anxiety!

A few thoughts. Why did this take me so long to read? I believe my fellow readers finished it months ago. I tried to get myself to read at least a chapter a day, but something about the book made it feel 2. I tried to get myself to read at least a chapter a day, but something about the book made it feel like a chore that I had to do and no one was gonna pay me an allowance for finishing this chore!

I thought the story was interesting, creative, and somewhat predictive of the current state of affairs with the COVID pandemic. But, I was rarely excited to get back to it or riveted while reading it.

Repetition : Before I started reading this book I saw that one of the biggest complaints several people had was that the writing tended to be repetitive. I thought,"how bad could the repetition really be? This book could still have had all the exposition, build up, character building, suspense, etc.

There were times that a point would be driven home ad nauseum several times in the same chapter. I wanted so bad for the story to reveal it and move on - or, at least stop bringing it up and come up with some new cliffhangers. If I had a dime for every time I said,"Ugh. Would I recommend this? In many circles this is considered a sci-fi classic and a must read.

For speculative sci-fi content, it is pretty good and worth it. But, as an enjoyable and pleasant reading experience, I cannot give my endorsement. Apr 05, Emma rated it liked it Shelves: time-travel , science-fiction. Just about 3 stars. It's a shame really because I LOVED the actual account of Kivrin and the details of life in the s community she was brought in to was fascinating. If all or the majority of this had been the main chunk of the story, this would easily have been 4 stars.

But I found the modern day story really boring. Sep 10, Cori rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: everyone. From my blog: If you haven't read anything by Connie Willis, I highly suggest that you stop whatever you're doing and go out and get one of her books. Willis is sort of a giant in the science fiction world -- she's won Hugo and Nebula awards, among many others.

Her plots are engaging and funny and heartbreaking and her books are nearly impossible to put down. Spoi From my blog: If you haven't read anything by Connie Willis, I highly suggest that you stop whatever you're doing and go out and get one of her books. The books of hers I've read are not science fiction in the Star Trek sense. Bellwether was much about science itself, and To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book are both set in the near future, the only difference being that her world has time travel.

There's a problem, however, and she's sent to instead of , and is dropped right smack down in the middle of the Plague. Meanwhile, an influenza strikes the present, and the people trying to get her back are struck down with a plague of their own. The book goes back and forth between Kivrin's battle to stay alive during one of history's darkest times, and the present, where they are trying to find a cure and rescue Kivrin.

There are some pretty gruesome parts when Willis goes into detail about how people are suffering during the plague -- those with sensitive constitutions be warned. Willis has a knack for creating worlds.

She populates both the past and the present with very interesting characters, and her take on the people of the Middle Ages is really fantastic. She doesn't spend a lot of time explaining the future world she's created. Things are the way they are.

I like this a lot better than authors who spend a lot of time explaining how the future came to be the way it is. View 2 comments. Give or take give a star or two ten.

Along with To Say Nothing of the Dog , which was apparently written by a woman called Connie Willis, whose name sounds vaguely familiar for some very weird reason. Why is this the mostest bestest time travel novel ever written, you ask? I am aware that you , being the Clueless Barnacles that you are, probably have trouble grasping the undeniable logic of this point. Such a lovely time to be alive this was: wonderful social system, varied diet, central heating, great hygiene…the works!

Not to mention the most glorious luxury of them all…the Black Death of Doom! They suffered horribly! They vomited blood and stuff!

Ooooh, sexey! Because the woman is so bloody shrimping gifted, and depicts delicious viruses and exquisite plagues so incredibly well, that you start wondering whether you should wear protective gear while reading the book I recommend this outfit , by the way.

It comes with a super handy, vital accessory and stuff. Ergo, you decide to give up, give in, and stop resisting, cough your lungs away in grand medieval style, and finish the book even it means you are going to die a slow, horrible, moderately excruciating death. View all 25 comments. Sep 25, Apatt rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites , sci-fi. This is one of the elite novels that won both Hugo and Nebula awards, there are not many of those and they are generally very good books though you and I can always find some titles to be undeserving, c'est la vie.

Before starting on reading this novel I looked around Goodreads and Amazon for some consensus of opinion among other readers. I found the prevailing opinion to be on the positive side but it is always interesting to note the negatives also, in case the reviewers hate the same things I This is one of the elite novels that won both Hugo and Nebula awards, there are not many of those and they are generally very good books though you and I can always find some titles to be undeserving, c'est la vie.

I found the prevailing opinion to be on the positive side but it is always interesting to note the negatives also, in case the reviewers hate the same things I do. Among the unfavorable reviews a common criticism seems to be that this book is boring. While I don't quite agree with this sentiment I understand it. We are bored by different things and have different levels of tolerance for certain kinds of plot or pacing. While I enjoy time traveling stories I tend to prefer those with a lots of paradoxes, going back and forth, becoming your own granddad, causing a massive rift in the space time continuum, that sort of thing.

Any way, just going to one time period and getting yourself in trouble because you are just too damn modern doesn't really do it for me. Having rambled on thus far I have to confess that I like this book a lot and I can't italicize it enough! Connie Willis' prose is nice and smooth, it reminds me of Lois McMaster Bujold's prose style, with just the right amount of elegance and witticism without sacrificing clarity.

The novel is immediately accessible from page one, which is always a bonus. This book is clearly character driven, though there are a few clever scifi concepts like the non-mechanical translating device recorder implant etc. Also, as this is generally a dark novel, the occasional interjections of humor is very welcome. The main character Kivrin is a wonderful creation, by the end of the novel I feel like this is a real person I have come to know very well.

She is courageous, compassionate, intelligent and vulnerable, Ms Willis certainly puts her through the wringer with this one, poor lass. Back to the "boring" allegation, there is some pacing or progression problem with this book, at times characters seem to be running around circle not advancing the plot very much. The search for Kivrin's entry point to medieval time also gets a bit tiresome.

That said, whether you will find this book intolerably boring will very much depend on how invested are you in the characters and their plight. I am totally sold on them. A very interesting question that the novel raised in my mind is since what happened in the medieval time has already happened as far as we in the present time are concerned, all the characters from that period have been dead ages ago, so does it matter to the visiting time traveller if they die or how they die?

I think it does because when they are with you they are just people. View all 5 comments. Feb 08, Aerin rated it liked it Shelves: british-isles , science-fiction , time-travel , historical-fiction.

Original review date: 11 May Doomsday Book has a wonderful concept, but I have never in my life read another book with such infuriatingly rotten pacing. The last two hundred pages are sublime, but I can't bring myself to raise the rating any higher than three stars.

In the first four hundred pages, we meet Kivrin, a young history undergraduate at Oxford in the near future. The development of time travel Original review date: 11 May Doomsday Book has a wonderful concept, but I have never in my life read another book with such infuriatingly rotten pacing.

The development of time travel has transformed history from an armchair science to a field of dangerous, exciting participant observation. However, no one has yet been sent back to study the Middle Ages, as they are considered much too hazardous.

Kivrin is determined to be the first. Now, here's where the book starts to get obnoxious. As readers, we are asked to believe that a bunch of university professors would send an inexperienced undergraduate as the very first envoy to the Middle Ages, alone and ill-prepared, while they run none of the safety checks that are typical with more routine types of time-travel???! There are so many reasons that this is ridiculously unbelievable -- or have negligence lawsuits and academic rigor been obliterated in the future?

In any case, Kivrin goes back in time. Only, a mistake has been made - she was supposed to go back to , well before the Black Death. Instead, she's accidentally been sent to , just as the plague is sweeping through England. Now, this is a pretty cool premise for a book. Only problem is, we don't even learn that this is the plot until page Until that point, we're treated to In the present, it should have been immediately apparent that an error had been made, BUT the tech who noticed the problem got deliriously ill before he could tell anyone.

It is so incredibly aggravating, I'm surprised I didn't end up tearing the book to shreds in my fury. I can't get a hold of so-and-so! Wherever could he be? His landline keeps ringing busy! Only he knows the answer to this major plot point! Let's let this hold up the story for at least 50 pages! One of the major "disasters" of this storyline is that the Evil Dean Of Evilness did I mention that the minor characters were all utterly one-dimensional?

So it's irrevocably lost and they'll never be able to find her!!! Seriously, in the future they can't save that information to a hard drive?

Or even a floppy? If any one of them had had more than two brain cells to rub together, they would have realized what had happened to Kivrin immediately. Okay, so there's THAT storyline. This story is much better, and it's what kept me reading through all the boringness. It is not without its own aggravations Kivrin too is something of a moron, missing all the GLARING signs that she's landed in the middle of a plague, plus, she ALSO immediately gets sick, making the first hundred or so pages of her adventure an exciting story of delirium and vomit.

But things pick up once her health returns, and we get to know the residents of this small medieval town. These sections read like an interesting and well-written historical fiction story, and the characters are lovable especially five-year-old Agnes and interesting. And then people start dying and stuff starts getting really interesting. The last pages flew by, and I enjoyed them immensely.

So - two stars for the first two-thirds, four and half stars for the last third. I'd say that averages out to about three. Don't read this book unless you have much more patience than I do Sep 13, Ms. Smartarse rated it really liked it Shelves: medieval , sci-fi , action-adventure , time-travel , historical , drama , friendship , survival. December , Oxford: time travel is now a thing.

Taking advantage of his boss' Christmas break, the acting head of Oxford University's History Department organizes a "sneaky" trip to the tail end of ; almost 30 years before the outbreak of the plague. As time travelers had not yet explored the years prior to the s, this trip is deemed especially dangerous. Yet as true ignoramuses, the organizers brush off any worries. After all, the most important prep stuff had been completed, and the December , Oxford: time travel is now a thing.

After all, the most important prep stuff had been completed, and the rest is obviously just needless worrying, which would take up way too much time anyway. Possibly even enough for unadventurous people to interfere.

Unsurprisingly, things end up going very badly, and not just for Kivrin who is travelling to the past, but also in present day Oxford. I recall carol recommending the sequel to this book, and my OCD brain interpreting that as having to read the prequel as well, because: one does not just tackle a series from the middle!

I, of course, promptly forgot about it altogether, and only my chronic laziness prevented it from getting removed from my tbr list. In a nutshell, this page digital brick of a book, chronicles the story of two pandemics. One in the middle ages with little to no resources available, and one from the near future, where almost all resources necessary for its eradication exist. Having Kivrin realize the futility of her pre-time-travel preparation was fairly predictable. The accuracy of the present-day pandemic though was quite impressive.

Or perhaps I should call it frustrating? After all it was published back in , based on research of the s Spanish Flu. That being said, most of the book's appeal lies in the storyline of the past, where the entire tragedy is both entirely predictable, and at the same time so much worse than that. With this in mind, I was truly surprised by how futile, yet also incredibly important Kivrin's efforts in helping the people around her eventually proved to be.

Score: 4. It turned out to be such a gripping tale, even with the frustrating amount of senseless bickering in the present day storyline. Even though I've shelved this book a little over 4 years ago, I don't think I could've appreciated it properly before.

Certainly not back in , before I had experienced living during a global pandemic. Not even last year, when I was way too frightened of getting sucked into yet another COVID conspiracy, as soon as I even thought of the news. Feb 10, Guillermo rated it really liked it Shelves: science-fiction. I think Connie Willis did a great job at portraying something so absolutely horrible that it defies comprehension.

I had read about the plague that almost eradicated Europe, but nothing could prepare me for what I read here. The horrors of the Black Death seem to be something so far beyond anything we could imagine.. I found myself cringing and pleading: "she's not going to go there The feeling of abandonment that these peopl I think Connie Willis did a great job at portraying something so absolutely horrible that it defies comprehension. The feeling of abandonment that these people had, coupled with the fact that they did not hold their religion to the casual standard that most people in this age do - that they really thought God, Angels, and Demons, were just as material as anything they could physically see and touch, made it that much more heart wrenching.

I could tell Willis did a shitload of research in writing this book, and just for that, I really appreciated this. It was not a book without faults however, the chapters in contemporary times were not as interesting.

Dunsworth and his "tasks" grew repetetive. It seems the author was tyring to create a parallel structure with the medieval and modern era, but it fell flat. Our heart was with Kivrin the entire time. Everything else was sort of irrelevant. As I say after I finish a Hamilton book: "Good, but needed to trim alot more fat. Most of that horror seems to happen "off camera". Not so much with Kivrin's chapters though.

This book really isn't for everyone. I had nightmares and I still think about this book more than most of the fiction I read, because while this is a fictionalized account, it really happened.

I can't help but place myself in some of those situations and start sweating. Wllis does a great job at making these characters more than just numbers in a history book. Trust me when I tell you that you will feel it. The technology described was not as impressive, but I can forgive her for not being a wonderful prognasticator of technology back in - for God's sakes, the internet was in its infantile stages back then.

How could I expect her to predict telecommunications in the year ? The Time travel itself had very interesting rules with the slippage, but not alot of thought went into the mechanism itself, which was a little disappointing, but it didn't take anything away from the novel. In my opinion, time travel is pretty much the stuff of fantasy anyways, which is ok, so I"m not going to get bothered by it.

It's speculative fiction after all, so we don't always need all the answers. So the bottom line was that it was a solid book that was sometimes oppresively dark, but light on the technical details and feasibility of the technology. It was a bit too long and repetitive at times. Could've served as a novella in my opinion. Powerful story- Kivrin's sections were wonderful to read, which were about half the book.

Could just as easily be a 3 or 3. View all 12 comments. Jan 22, Marc rated it did not like it. Why I hated this book by Marc. I read a lot. The number of books I list on my read list here is a fraction of what I read. And for the most part, none have reviews, just ratings, because I have little time to write reviews.

But I just had to comment on "The Doomsday Book". I fell into a trap. I read reviews of the book before I bought it, and those reviews help convince me to give it a try. That is something I usually do not do. I usually read the back cover, and if it sounds good, I buy it. But Why I hated this book by Marc. But I read the back cover of this, and it sounded interesting, maybe something great, but the reviews pushed me over. Nebula and Hugo winner. I was sold. Like a fool. Is it just me or are the Hugo winners, many times, just boring to read.

I mean, they sound good in summary, but when you read them many make you go "Meh". Canticle for Lebowitz, I am looking at you. This book, again, started well. But heck, by page , all the plot that had developed was what I had read on the back cover. By , little more had changed, except I learned about bell ringers. At that point The book is pgs at least , I had enough.

I put the book down. Again, it was an interesting premise, but way to verbose. And I like verbose, when it suits the book. See China Mievile But not here. I don't need to know a conversation between two doctors about how they like to drink their tea.

Some call it a writer's style, I call it filler. So I put the book down. Then I did something I have never done before. I went to Wikipedia and I looked up the book. I mean, I invested a day's reading into it, and I at least deserved to know how it ended.

Well, lets just say I would have been disappointed if I had stuck with it. Here is where I am torn; I think Willis is a good writer, but it is just not my cup of tea. So I won't tell people not to read the book, as some obviously love it. It seems to have a cult following But I will tell people who are looking for a hard scifi book to stay away Nov 19, Shannon rated it it was amazing Shelves: owned , my-very-best-reads , books-reviewed , fantasy-scifi , historical-fiction.

Note that while they are sending people out that said society has their own plague epidemic taking place. The strengths of this novel are its attention to Historical details, the engaging and believable characters suitable to an era and the dark but hopeful tones and themes of the story.

Most readers will feel humbled about humanity's belief that it has everything figured out as the tale parallels massive amounts of people being wiped out during both eras. Prevalent themes of love, bravery, faith and hope. View all 8 comments. Feb 27, Manybooks rated it it was amazing Shelves: book-reviews , historical-fiction , time-travel-time-slip , history , pandemics.

Furthermore, while I as a university trained academic of course do believe in continuously striving for more and more knowledge, Doomsday Book also clearly points out that the quest for the latter, that wanting to explore and research does not ever exist in a vacuum and that scientists, researchers, archaeologists etc. So while I did originally read Doomsday Book totally and only for personal entertainment value and yes, because I enjoy time travelling novels and reading about the Middle Ages , what has remained with me regarding Connie Willis' narrative are in fact mostly the questions and musings I have considered and expanded on above, about our human and societal responsibilities regarding high level, regarding any type of research and that especially archaeologists absolutely do need to make sure their unearthings and studies of the past and in particular of human and animal remains do not negatively affect the present with the possible spread of long buried diseases.

And yes indeed, if in the future, time travel for academic research and exploration purposes were to ever become an actual realiy, that this obviously would also need to be approached both prudently and with primarily public health and safety in mind as while, for example, when Kivrin while in the past discovers that Middle English during the time of the Black Death was still at least in the vernacular, in the spoken language of the English people considerably more inflected than assumed by her current day Oxford professors, that knowledge, while definitely most interesting, is not really all that necessary and even acceptable to try to gain if its acquisition is or might prove to be dangerous or deadly in the current, in the present age.

View all 10 comments. Apr 30, Caroline rated it it was ok Shelves: science-fiction , she-wrote-it , fantasy , waste-of-trees , so-much-potential. Its premise is a great one, and the story is straightforward and intriguing, but Doomsday Book could easily have been half as many pages with no harm to the story. Everything does end up resolved, just not until the bitter end. The Middle Ages section is much more compelling than the present day. It has forward-moving action, and its integration of facts about the Black Death make it particularly gripping; Willis took great care to put a human face on this horrifying sickness, and it paid off.

In the present-day section, Willis attempted to create suspense in several spots but failed because she held out too long in the resolution. This makes for one very frustrating and, at times, boring reading experience. The characterization is at least strong, with some characters particularly lovable. Interestingly, this is a science fiction that has aged well. Cell phones have screens that allow people to see as well as hear each other. Work tasks are done on computers. The common cold has been cured.

Doomsday Book is educational, and it's enjoyable now and then, but for a time travel story, it sure lacks a sense of adventure. Reading time would be better spent with a quality non-fiction book on the Black Death. View all 15 comments.

Rated up, regardless - for well-intended aspirations. I've been both eager and hesitant to re- engage with this book for a while; it came to me highly praised, and I came to it wanting to be touched by that apparent, profound admiration inducing experience.

Yet, previous encounters with Willis have left me dubious of if I'd ever be fully enamored by their particular style. Making this more of an examination of why that might be. The book's themes are powerful and - incidentally - strikingly current again. The momentum in the plentiful of dialogue is pleasant to follow; fun to 'play along', even. Yet, with all its circling around, the narrative never quite allows itself to go beyond the limited boundaries it keeps setting for itself.

There's something in the very form of the problem-solving lead plot, which allows the presentation not to feel quite true to the events. But beyond surface level remarks and constant relay of movement, it expresses hardly any mental response: no moral conflict, instinctual hesitation, inner doubt The style of storytelling in general seems in need of more finely tuned situational calibration; the method of dispersing adversity, and reacting to it, is universally handled by aimless darting about and piling on tasks, creating a persistent manner of distracting obstinacy, and nurturing of constant unnecessary secondary drama - commotion to bury even the coherent responses under, and certainly dissolving of any suspense.

Overall, Willis' approach feels almost habitual of self-preserving distancing; without revealing most anything of oneself in its interactions, it places the narration in positions where it can direct the focus of any event - big or small - into the immediate directorial minutia, and drown itself into repetitious - often self-initiated - worked up urgency, scene after scene after scene.

It sees no importance in engaging mentally, or providing any inner contemplation to the events. Throughout, the narration presents itself generally more preoccupied with the mechanics of the messes of its own invention, than is affected to reflect on the nature and weight of the events it is cast to witness.

The narration imposes itself in the proximity of vulnerable situations, but rarely lets itself slip into a position of showing emotional intelligence. Rather, it goes its way to insert any possible sideline distractions into the action, as if to avoid the manifestation of a passing emotionally resonant response to the events - until starting to the next errand.

All of which, for me, made the narration appear flat, suspiciously unequipped or unwilling for introspection, and distractingly task-focused to convey the full weight of any affecting fates it's inflicted itself upon. Creating also an almost Kevin Costner-esquely principled leading figure, in a sense of hollow and out of place self-insertion, basking in others' narratives.

The story operates around compelling and significant themes, full of exploratory potential. It follows Willis' customarily precise directorial beats, with highly active characters, theatrically exchanged dialogue, and some well performing tender moments.

But I would not call it's approach moving: expecting it to be, the general response to the events themselves left an unsatisfactory impression of mental uninvolvement and avoidance of contemplation; kept me waiting for an overall more considerate reflection - if the work was to convey soul, allow resonance, or earn my emotional investment. That said: some of the most experience enriching passages of the book came from the presence of children.

And slight character affirmation was delivered in couple of stand-out occasions, when the narrator allowed their inner thoughts to briefly show through in rare, separate personal anecdotes in archiving. Mere exceptions to the ruling chaos, however: these solitary instances of deliberation were unfortunately vastly outweighed by data speculation and the overwhelmingly prevailing action reporting.

And just as I felt with that saga, here too Willis' style seems most suitable as a script - open for generous emotional interpretation and dressing up. And, there is the issue of repetitious prose, too. Which luckily, was mitigated by the audio format for a good length of the way until the disappointment sank in and I let the absurdity come flooding. The audiobook narration was wonderfully befitting for Willis' characters' volatility, and for the adorably childish demeanors present - the kids being kids.

As much as I kept wanting for this to share stronger emotional involvement, I think I can settle for analytical minutia, too. And as tiringly out of control of its own faculties as the narrative form is, the consistently idiosyncratic patterns in the telling alone inspire certain curiosity to checking out more of Willis' work. Accompanied by the lingering hope for the possibility of still stumbling across something - beyond intentions - deserving of admiration.

View all 7 comments. Mar 08, Fiona rated it really liked it Shelves: read-in , read-in , the-past , speculating-wildly , comfort-zone-stretchers , audiobooks. Following my abject failure with noir wizards, I'm retreating to an audiobook that seems to contain everything I like: lady-protagonists, time travel, semi-distant British history, and plague.

Loads of plague. I've been wondering how to approach this review for ages. Looking at what other people have written, it seems that the g Following my abject failure with noir wizards, I'm retreating to an audiobook that seems to contain everything I like: lady-protagonists, time travel, semi-distant British history, and plague.

Looking at what other people have written, it seems that the general consensus is that it isn't a perfect book - but it does just fit into now very well. I can agree with that. The strengths of Doomsday Book lie in the affection you end up having for the characters, and how close to them you end up feeling. It does a thing very well, that I suspect a lot of writing advice tells you not to do, but I wish more books did, and that thing is saving the action til later. Let me qualify that a bit - Doomsday Book is a book of two halves; the first half involves a lot of people hanging around in places and waiting for conversations that they don't end up having.

It took me three months to read the first half. And then in the second half everything seems to happen at once, and keeps on happening, unrelentingly and inexorably, and I finished it in about a week. But I wouldn't have liked the second half so much, wouldn't have cared, or felt that gut-wrench of loss and regret, if it hadn't been for the first half.

Where it felt like nothing was happening. But it was happening, because it was three hundred pages of slow-build getting to know characters in their natural habitat.

And I love that! I love it. My biggest, most common gripe about stories is that I don't get a chance to see what "normal" means for characters before it's summarily broken by Plot Happening. So I don't think that the slowness of the first half was a weakness at all, even though I suspect some people do. I think it was a strength, and I am delighted that I got to hang out with a load of ladies in the fourteenth century, with some increasingly irate bellringers in somewhere that's less the near future than an adorably alt I thought it was charming.

I loved that it ended up having a purpose beyond that. People die in this book, and other people have to watch it happen, and I cared about all of them. I felt strongly for all of them, because I knew them, and I felt their fear. This is what I want stories about inevitable disaster to look like. Don't imagine I think it's faultless, however: like other readers, I was also very swiftly bored of the word "necrotic", and endless updates on the remaining supply of toilet paper in Oxford.

To be honest, even I have limits to the number of times you can have "going to meet someone; they're not there, but it's a nice place anyway - look at the scenery! But I still think this is the sort of thing that sci-fi should be used for: to make me care about people I might never have thought to care about otherwise. That matters. If you're an audiobook sort of person, by the way, I highly recommend this one - Jenny Sterlin is really great, especially for a whopper like this 26 hours 30 minutes!

Apparently she's done some of Laurie R. King's Mary Russell books too? I'll be looking out for those - I bet they're great. One other thing. The OverDrive Read format of this ebook has professional narration that plays while you read in your browser. Learn more here. You've reached the maximum number of titles you can currently recommend for purchase. Your session has expired.

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