What I find most objectionable about this book is its apparent lack of editing. Half the novel consists of people panicking over the phone about other phone conversations other people have had about people getting on and off trains who are the children of WHO CARES. Willis has no sense of perspective, no skill for inventing the suggestive detail; consequently, this novel is a monument to the gods of boredom. This on top of the implausible premise that if time travel were available as a technolog...

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 was so freaking good!! I’m going to have to get the other books now!! Mel 🖤🐶🐺🐾

Apocalyptic!(That's a quote from the only character I truly liked in this book.)My first Connie Willis book. I’ve heard A LOT about this from all kinds of other readers. And I must admit that there is no denying the quality. At all. But more of that later.This is about a historical institute belonging to the University of Oxford in 2054/2055. 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...

I am very concerned. I read “The Doomsday Book” time travel saga, eagerly anticipating it based on the many Goodreads reviews that highly praise this story. Many reviewers whom I trust rave about this book. I just didn’t see it at all, not a bit. Not only was it supremely boring, but annoying. The first 120 pages can be summarized: “something is wrong”. During the next 180 pages, the rest of the characters realize there is “something wrong”. Yawn! I felt like slapping virtually every character i...

Updated: 07/05/10Connie Willis shows us that we do not need to look to the future for an apocalyptic setting suitable for exorcising whatever demons haunt us, testing whatever faith we may or may not have, revealing the height of humanity's capacity for compassion or the depth of its misery. We had the mid-14th 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.~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~A week ago or so, I...

Just about 3 stars. It's a shame really because I LOVED the actual account of Kivrin and the details of life in the 1300s 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.

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

The Middle Ages are a shady back alley of history. They are a juvenile delinquent to which all the 'proper' historical eras give the proverbial 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...

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...

and what exactly was the point of this nearly 600-page novel? 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 or exercising or taking naps. or reading another book. the entire thing is a monument to wasted time - my time and the characters' time and the 5 years of time it took to write this extravagantly dreary ode to pointlessness.real...

Christmas 2010: I realised that I had got stuck in a rut. I was re-reading old favourites again and again, waiting for a few trusted authors to release new works. Something had to be done.On the spur of the moment I set myself a challenge, to read every book to have won the Locus Sci-Fi award. That’s 35 books, 6 of which I’d previously read, leaving 29 titles by 14 authors who were new to me.While working through this reading list I got married, went on my honeymoon, switched career and became a...

OMG I am finally finished! What a travel down a monotonous road. I will not attempt to say once again what has been so eloquently said many times before. But one thing that I had to mention was a phrase that has stuck in my mind for days. I found myself last week picking up the book so that I might be able to put closure on it. So there I am reading (ok skimming) this book as some say “Best time-travel novel I've ever read!” or “a study of people's behavior” what behavior, all the characters did...

I finished Doomsday Book this morning and immediately moved on to the next book on my to-read list, which happens to be Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Doomsday Book left me a little messed up in the head and I wanted to replace the imagery and train of thought with something new. I figured I'd have to let Doomsday Book mull around in my head for a while before I could write an effective review. I figured the same about Iain Banks' Transition, another book I recently finished. So my plan was to read Hy...

$1.99 Kindle sale, Jan. 21, 2019. Maybe my favorite time travel book ever (and I do like me a good time travel tale), Doomsday Book won both the Hugo and Nebula (as well as several other awards) in the early 1990s when it was published. Kivrin is a history major at Oxford in a near-future world where time travel machines are controlled by universities and used for research purposes. Kivrin is traveling back in time to live in a medieval English village for a few weeks, but things go just a bit e...

SPOILER ALERT - THIS BOOK WAS TERRIBLE - AND I WILL RUIN THE ENDINGIf you're only going to read one book this year... Make sure this one is simply on hand in case you run out of toilet paper. If you think that's being crude, let me remind you a lack of toilet paper is one of her side plots she uses to move things along. And by move things along, I mean NOTHING IN THIS STORY GOES ANYWHERE EVER.This book won a Nebula and Hugo award. Oh swoon, right? OMG this must be awesome, right??? Well, no... A...

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. This is the third book I've read by her (in addition to To Say Nothing of the Dog and Bellwether), and I must say, the woman can write. Her plots are engaging and funny and heartbreaking and her books are nearly impossible to put down.(Spoi...

This is my second read. The first time I read it, I was fascinated by CW's take on time travel and the mirroring of the plague in the future with the past's Black Death, but moreover, the characters snuck up on me and tore my soul apart. It was, perhaps, the best time-travel novel I'd ever read.That was then.But now? Even when I knew it was coming, when I tried to keep from loving all these characters in the past and in the future, I was unable to help myself. They're flawed, annoying, lovable,

2.5 to 3 StarsThis book took me about half a year to finish. I started it in the middle of a book slump caused by anxiety early on in the COVID-19 pandemic. 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 started this as part of a buddy 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...

😷 Pestilence for the Win Buddy Read (PftWBR™) with Eilonwy and Elena 😷• Previous rating: 5 pathetic stars • New rating: 12 stars. Give or take give a star or two ten.There are only three things you need to know about this book:① The cover for my edition is one of the most AMAZING things works of art I was ever given to see:Not sure whether it’s amazing because:a) It’s scary as fishb) There’s a 90% chance of going color blind if you stare at it for more than 2 and a half minutesc) It looks like t...