#doomsday book

[victusinveritas]

Domesday Book shit.

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[haveyoureadthisscifibook]

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

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[oldshrewsburyian]

I finally read Connie Willis's 'Doomsday Book' on your recommendation and despite some frustration at the "people in the Middle Ages never washed" cliche and then ended up totally emotionally destroyed by the end (Father Roche was the one that broke my heart the most). I bought "To Say Nothing of the Dog" as soon as I was finished.

Oh, hooray!! Father Roche also breaks my heart, and I love Kivrin and her mentor so much. I hope you enjoy To Say Nothing of the Dog; it is, in my opinion, a romp of the first water.

[inlovewithquotes]

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

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

When I hear the phrase "Doomsday Book," I imagine an ancient tome full of prophecies and portentions about the old gods rising to raze the Earth and create one anew, not a glorified census ledger.

[irisbleufic]

Anyone want to make me an offer on a NON-PERSONALIZED, SIGNED hardcover copy of Doomsday Book? I bought this non-personalized copy from a bookseller on eBay a few years ago, when I was very ill and assumed I would never get to meet Connie and have her inscribe a copy….

(Obviously, I survived cancer and got my personalized, signed hardcover now and don’t need a duplicate!)

[clonerightsagenda]

Thinking about Doomsday Book again and poor Father Roche is convinced Kirvin is a saint who fell from heaven and she hates his vibes. Crushing judgement from God.

[bobbie-robron]

Prodigals aren't usually trusted with keys, even if they have time to collect one before going out to prodigalize.

16-Oct-1972

[nevinslibrary]

Weird & Wonderful Wednesday

Time travel book. Ouch. (That was my brain). But oh such a good ouch.

Kivrin is a student in 2048 who, to study the Middle Ages, is going to go back to the 14th Century. But, oops, she sorta lands in the past around the time of the bubonic plague. Oh, and add to that, there’s a pandemic going on in the ‘present’ as well.

The links between past and present were interesting. And, I really liked the characters, especially those in the Middle Ages. And, while I wondered how the fact that Kivrin is a woman would play out, and, I thought that was well done too. One warning is that it is a very long book again. (Almost 600 pages). But, other than that it was a really really fun read (even if it was a bit dark).

You may like this book If you Liked: In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker, Eifelheim by Michael Flynn, or The Scribe of Siena by Melodie Winawer

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

[gher-bear]

[oldshrewsburyian]

Hi! I was wondering if you had any recs for fiction and non-fiction about the Black Death?

Hello! Do I ever!

Fiction: Connie Willis, Doomsday Book. In the near future, when time travel is discovered, it is put in the hands of the historians of Oxford University. This is 1) perfectly rational 2) gloriously doomed to suffer the fate of any large-scale project put in the hands of a tweedy and aggressively unworldly professor and a handful of ambitious postgraduate students. Also, the technologies of time travel are in their infancy. So our bright-eyed young historian gets sent to the middle of the fourteenth century by mistake, and her aggressively unworldly, intensely loyal supervisor is not going to let her fall victim to one of history's greatest crises. I love them.

Fictionalized history: John Hatcher, The Black Death: An Intimate History. Hatcher wrote this after having spent over half his life immersed in the records of medieval England, and it shows. Using the surviving documentation of villages and manors, he constructs a hypothesized case study of how one set of people might have responded to the pandemic. It's poignant and interesting, I think.

Non-fiction: this gets a bit trickier because Black Death studies have been moving at a dizzying speed for the last decade or so, and rapidly for the past 15 years. I have had to revise my teaching on it every. single. time. I have taught, just to keep up with the scholarship. (I'm not mad about it; I'm just tired.) Anyway: the 2014 issue of The Medieval Globe has a collection of very valuable and interesting essays, and if you poke around a bit, you might still find them open-access on the authors' respective webpages. I really like Bruce M.S. Campbell's The Great Transition: Climate, Disease, and Society in the Late-Medieval World (2016.) There's also this webinar you can access free of charge:

[pmg227]

Reading Prize Winners: Part Two

Reading Prize Winners: Part Two

I wrote in a previous post of the twelve prize-winning books I challenged myself to read this year and gave a quick review of the first three I read. Here are the next three. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000. It also won the Puddly Award for Short Stories in 2001 and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel in 2000. This group of short stories…

[agood-omen]

A collection of some of my favourite chapter titles

[wickedcriminal]

I have worn that bracelet every day of my life.

Happy fifth day of Doomsday~ ☠️