Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) in Building a SciFi/Fantasy Library

Jun 24, 2024 emily rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction-historical, arthuriana-medieval, sci-fi, cw-body-horror, to-say-nothing-of-the, anglophilia, audiobook, book-within-a-book, cw-animal-death, one-of-a-kind

4.5 stars rounding up to 5
for the Pick-A-Shelf "Lost" Challenge : read the 10 books that have been on your TBR the longest.

This was an incredible book. As someone who studied a lot of medieval history and literature in my school days, the depth of research Willis must have done to write this is staggering. I'm not sure why I expected this to be funnier-- maybe because the other works of hers I've read have all had me laughing? There was humor in this, for sure, but it was not a funny book. In f 4.5 stars rounding up to 5
for the Pick-A-Shelf "Lost" Challenge : read the 10 books that have been on your TBR the longest.

This was an incredible book. As someone who studied a lot of medieval history and literature in my school days, the depth of research Willis must have done to write this is staggering. I'm not sure why I expected this to be funnier-- maybe because the other works of hers I've read have all had me laughing? There was humor in this, for sure, but it was not a funny book. In fact, it was quite bleak-- the summary on the back doesn't prepare you for the fact that this is a book about a woman who goes back in time and lives through the onset of the Black Death in England. They repeat the statistic often, that the plague killed 1/3 to 1/2 of the population of Europe; they say often that many places reached a point where there was no one left to bury the bodies. But nothing is quite as human as Kivrin watching everyone around her, from the priest to the old woman to the five year old child, fall ill and die in the most painful and gruesome way.

A few notes from my updates that I wanted to capture : it's so rare to come across a child character in adult literature who feels accurate to the age that they're supposed to be, showing both how damned annoying kids can be to adults, but also maintaining that they're people with minds and personalities who deserve respect and agency. Agnes was a great character-- she was such a pest, but was such a bright spot in the landscape of the family, and by the time it became apparent that she too was going to die, it was absolutely gutting.

Also, Willis has a gift of capturing the mundanity of workplace politics and drama and making it, if not interesting, at least funny. It's the entire substance of her short story Bellwether, which I remember really enjoying, and although I'm not an academic, I've heard enough stories from my friends and family who are to know that this portrayal of departmental negotiations, blame-dodging, ambition, and PR is all too real. I had real sympathy for Dunworthy in that regard, even as I laughed at him.

Something I also really liked about this book is a thing I'm not sure I can explain concisely, but the parallels and themes that are common to both timelines, that don't have a Message per se but add to the richness of the story and make it feel like all one thing instead of two separate storylines. The only thing I can compare it to is Kraken, where ink and light and physical bodies and spaces are all important ideas to all the various threads of the plot. Here, bells play a part in both timelines in several ways; there are strong similarities between Willy's mother and Lady Imeyne, between Imeyne and Mr Gilchrist-- and in fact, just looking up how to spell Imeyne's name led me to this essay by Kristin Cashore that explains exactly what I'm talking about much more eloquently and with more details. Check it out here: https://kristincashore.com/bells-and-... --Cashore is much more familiar with the book than I am, so I only picked up on some of what she talks about in the essay, but I did notice some of it and really enjoyed it.

Really Cashore's essay says a lot of what I want to say about this, namely that this book is a masterpiece, it's very sad, but very human, and reading it in a post-COVID world was a bit of a mindfuck but only added to how hard it hit me emotionally. Really glad I finally got around to reading this.

Also the audio narrator is delightful. ...more

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Dec 28, 2011 Tani rated it really liked it

Shelves: female-author, historical, scifi, 2012

The first 2/3rds was a slog through minutiae, with brief points of interest. The final 1/3rd was absolutely heart-breaking.

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Oct 27, 2007 Sarah Sammis rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historical-fiction, released, scifi

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jul 08, 2012 Andrea rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction, time-travel

Another great Connie Willis book. Great story, great characters, great writing. (I would have given almost everything I've read by her 5 starts now, except for I always run out of patience with the fretting in the middle and want to hurry toward the resolution. You think I am being impatient, but the fretting is looooong.) Times are terrible in this book and the ability to hope is immense, and it was wonderful. ...more

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Aug 03, 2007 skyhigh-kin rated it really liked it

this is a time-travel sort of book..kivrin,the main character travel back in time to the black death era..her mission is to study the era for her course which is...she encounter many circumstances and almost died....really gud!but too long...so it gets bored sometimes..

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Feb 07, 2012 valpal rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

Wow! This one goes on the favorites shelf. I was shocked to see that this book was written 20 years ago. How did I miss it? Mystery, History, and Science Fiction all rolled into one rollicking adventure!

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