Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel #1) by Connie Willis

I read Doomsday Book by Connie Willis in 2013. At our last book club meeting, I was talking about it with a friend who is caught up on the Outlander series and was looking for another time travel series. Suddenly, everyone there thought it would be a great idea to read it for our January meeting and here we are. I think it's important to say that this book was published in 1992 because some of it is really prophetic (see especially the two lines of note I pulled out). 

Kirvin is a historian who has been given clearance to go back into time. But, while the team in a near-future London tries to make sure that they can get her at the rendezvous location, a crisis happens in London and Kirvin's ability to survive is in question. 

In general, I still really like this book. Maybe I don't LOVE it as much as 2013 NGS did, but I still think this is a solid read. I thought the beginning was a bit slow to get started and we focused a lot on other characters besides Kirvin for quite some time, so it was hard to warm up to Kirvin. My book club peeps mostly agreed with this - the beginning was a bit challenging, but once it got going, it was hard to stop reading. People who listened to the audiobook thought that it was actually a nice pace for an audiobook, so that's an interesting point. I read a hardcover version and it had teeny tiny print, so maybe that's another consideration.

We had such an interesting conversation about this book. One of the quieter members of the book club started things with a "I'd obviously go back in time if I had a choice and couldn't mess anything up." And boy was that a controversial statement! What about a lack of food, the threat of illness, no indoor plumbing or heat? WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOUR PERIOD STARTED? Super fun discussion.

4/5 stars

Things I looked up:

scrofula (page 5 for the first time) - A swelling of the lymph nodes in the neck caused by a bacterial infection. It can be treated with antibiotics and sometimes is surgically removed. It is usually caused by tuberculosis. 

Domesday Book (page 35 for the first time) - A manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 at the behest of William the Conqueror - the main purpose was to record the annual value of every piece of landed property to its lord, and the resources in land, labor force, and livestock from which the value came. The name "Domesday Book" came into use in the 12th century because its decisions were unalterable, like those in the Last Judgment, and its sentence could not be quashed. 

king's evil (page 109) - alternative name for scrofula (see above)

St. Vitus dance (page 109)  - also known as the dancing plague, was a social phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries, involving groups of people dancing erratically, sometimes thousands at a time (this seemed familiar to me as I was writing it up - there's a Sawbones podcast episode about it!)

prie-dieu (page 248) - a type of prayer desk primarily intended for private devotional use, but which may also be found in churches

Lines of note:

"Explain! Perhaps you'd like to explain it to me, too. I'm not used to having my civil liberties taken away like this. In America, nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can't go."

And over thirty million Americans died during the Pandemic as a results of that sort of thinking, he thought. (Page 58)

Can you imagine Willis writing about terrible America would be at handling a pandemic in 1992?! 

"I've posted notices asking that everyone conserve lavatory paper, but it's done no good at all. The Americans are particularly wasteful." (page 259)

SO PROPHETIC!!! 

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

She had taken off her coat and wool hat and set them on the only other chair...Her gray hair was in disarray, as if she had tried to fluff it up after taking her hat off. (page 3)

The outside door opened and a knot of people, all taking down umbrellas and shaking out hats, came in, were order-of-serviced by Colin, and went into the nave. (page 169)

"Put your hat on," he said, unfolding a blue paper crown. (page 210)

"....but that's old hat." (page 260)

"Where in God's name do you get these figures?" Dunworthy said. "Pull them out of a hat?" (page 263)

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven 

The Glass Hotel

Sea of Tranquility is a hard book to describe. We follow multiple characters in various time periods and geographic locations. Edwin St. Andrew is the third son of a British noble who has been exiled to Canada in the early twentieth century, Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour on Earth in 2203, and Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is a detective in the far future who has been hired to solve a mystery. There are reappearances of characters from The Glass Hotel, so it was fun to think of this as part of the ESJM extended universe, like Taylor Jenkins Reid does. It is a standalone novel and you don't need to read The Glass Hotel to know what's going on, but they were fun Easter eggs. 

The writing in this book is divine. The pacing is spot on. There's a dog AND a cat. Her writing is effortless. The multiple storylines converge in a perfect way and it really rewards careful reading. 

I have a handful of quibbles with the book: the author substitute complaining about how hard her life on tour is a particular sort of whining that privileged people do that irritates me, the pandemic storyline was a little bit too on point, and time travel is not my favorite sci-fi trope, although I think she handled it really well here. But those quibbles do not overshadow my overall enjoyment of the book.

And, just like with all ESJM's books, I can't stop thinking about it days after I've finished it. There's something about the fact that we will all die and centuries from now, it won't matter how or when. I just keep looking around my house, a place I am so proud to call home, and wondering what will happen to all of it when I'm gone. 

4.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia. (page 5)

I think this one sentence describes me perfectly. I am Edwin.

Sometimes order can be relentless. (page 68)

Right? We had a friend in grad school whose house was immaculate. She had a big, dumb retriever named Thor and Thor got his paws washed and dried every time he came into the house. It was very stressful to be in her house, even though she was a lovely hostess and so very kind and obviously loved her dog very much.

"...I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world." (page 189)

One of the reasons that we never had children was because we really felt like it would be irresponsible to bring a child into a world where their future will never be as bright as ours were. Maybe it is narcissistic for us to feel this way, but we always thought we'd rather regret not having children instead of regretting having them.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

 

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North comes courtesy of the Top Books By Women Authors in r/fantasy, so all I knew is that it had some sort of sci-fi/fantasy tie-in when I started it.  

In this book, Harry August lives an undistinguished life as a British person and then he dies. But he is born again and soon realizes that he has all the memories of his previous life. He dies again and is reborn with all the memories of his previous two lives.  And so it goes. Harry is always born in a bathroom of a train station as his birth mother dies. He is adopted by a couple and he has to live his childhood and adolescence over and over again, despite having the knowledge of an adult. Eventually there are secret societies, espionage, and world-wide chaos.

The first third of this book is a bit slow-moving, at least it was for me. But then there came a turning point when I simply couldn't put the book down. I had to know if Harry was going to be okay and I had to know how Harry was going to make it out. Generally speaking, I do not like time travel books, but this is an interesting twist on time travel and I thought it took the Groundhog's Day plot and did something new with it.

3.5/5 stars

Notable lines:

"In thirty years it would be a parody accent, used by comics to expose the sad cliché of the lonely man who believed that Ascot was sacred and could never quite get a ticket." (page 128)

When we were shopping for my husband's wedding suit, we were at a fancy men's suiting store waiting for the tailor to do a fitting.  We were poking around, sort of looking at ties and another customer was turning around a giant lazy Susan and asked "is this your entire selection of ascots?" Dear Reader, I've never been ANYWHERE with a larger selection of ascots and sometimes when one of us is being picky about shopping for something, we will use the ascot line.  Now you know one of our inside jokes.

"It is perhaps the universal experience of travellers - I have only my own view to judge it by - but there is a moment, in the dead hours of the night, when a man may sit upon a platform in an empty station, waiting for the last train upon a long journey, and regardless of the personal experience of that individual, he ceases to be an "I" and becomes a "he."" (page 144)

I think we all have that out-of-body experience when on a trip somewhere. I was doing a training in Canada one January when weather happened (because Canada + January) and I found myself sleeping in the Winnipeg airport with my luggage.  I swear I thought the whole thing was happening to someone else. Also, there were A LOT of dogs in the Winnipeg airport - just LARGE dogs wandering around the baggage claim and it just seemed like a dream that was happening to someone else. The people were SO nice, the dogs were SO plentiful, and I just have fond memories of Winnipeg.

""We're just fucking soldiers. We kill some guys, they kill our guys, we kill their guys back - none of it fucking means anything, you know? Just numbers on a page, and only when the numbers get big enough do the fat cats who decide this shit sit down and go, 'Wow, let's make the decision we were always gonna have to make anyway.'...And you know the best bit?...None of it fucking matters. Not one bullet, not one drop of blood. None of it makes any fucking difference at all.":(page 217)

Bleak.

Things I Looked Up:

There was a plot point about China under Mao Zedong and I honestly just didn't know the timeline because my knowledge of history is shaky. (page 287)

Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956-1957) - Mao Zedong basically encouraged citizens to openly criticize the Community Party. This didn't go well for people who took him up on his offer.

Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) - This was Mao Zedong's plan to reorganize the farms of China into communes. It was a disaster for many reasons and estimates range from 15 - 55 million people died (55 MILLION!!).  

Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) - Attack on cultural and intellectual elites. Devastation to culture and tradition.  

Dragonquest (Dragonriders of Pern #2) by Anne McCaffery

Dragonflight

Dragonquest is the second novel in the Dragonriders of Pern saga. It takes place immediately after the first book.  Lessa had traveled back in time and gotten a bunch of dragonriders from the past to come into the future to assiste the severely depleted dragonrider population defeat the Threads.  

In this book, the Old Dragonriders butt heads with the New Dragonriders in terms of customs and expectations from commoners. Then these fire lizards show up, small, fire-breathing creatures that can go in between like dragons and they're all causing friction among everyone. There's trouble with weyrwomen, F'nor is all raping a lady who doesn't want it (but it's OKAY, she falls in love with him, OBVIOUSLY), and Threads are falling out of schedule, so there's danger everywhere.  There's just so much.

So why is this book so boring?  There is a lot of action, I promise. The writing is fine. Some of the gender relations is dated (first published in 1971, so I can let some of it slide).  We get to hang out with some of the characters from the first book and we get some new characters.  We get new creatures. We get lots of snarky dragon communication. 

I don't know. Reading it was like doing my homework, though. I think it is all about the characters. I wrote that I would let some of the gender relations stuff slide, but I think I lied about that. It's just manly men being manly men and sweet little ladies who need to be taken care of, except for that one woman who is just a slut and selfish and horrible.  

This series is absolutely beloved. I should love it - dragons, female author, and an immersive world to fall into.  But I don't. I think I'll probably let this series go and move on to reading other McCaffery works. 

Have you ever read Dragonriders of Pern? Did you love it?

Dragonflight (Dragonriders of Pern #1) by Anne McCaffery

 

Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey is the first novel in the very long Dragonriders of Pern series. I have started and stopped reading this book at least a dozen times because it seems like something I should like. Fantasy? Written by a woman? A female main character? Dragons?  I mean.  Doesn't it seem like a perfect match for me?

Well.

Hmmm...

It's just that there's also time travel and I am not a fan.  It's too easy a solution.  

Synopsis: Lessa is pretending to be an ordinary kitchen servant while she's plotting to take back her ancestral keep from its current evil caretaker when she suddenly meets and bonds with a queen dragon and becomes a dragonrider.  The Threads are attacking Pern and Lessa and the very depleted dragon corps must save the world! But how will they do this?  (Hint: see previous paragraph.)

The good: Most of the time I like Lessa. She's sort of a bad ass. And she has a dragon!  F'lar can get brained in the head, though, for a taste of his own medicine.  

Non-time travel issues: This is a book in which the gender relations have not aged well. This was written in 1968 and it really shows. Lessa is pseudo-raped, hits slapped, shook, and hit by her lover/abuser, and *obviously* falls in love with him.  I find this type of romance storyline to be super hard to get through. I know that this was written *in a different time,* but that doesn't mean rape was okay in the 1960s anymore than it is okay today.  

I'm on the fence about whether or not to read any other books in the series, particularly the original trilogy. It's absolutely beloved and I want to understand the hype. On the other hand, there are plenty of other books out there that I presume I would appreciate more.  The next book is available for me to download in ebook form RIGHT NOW and I guess if I run out of books to read on my Kindle, maybe I'll give it a go, but it will not be a priority.  

A Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux

 

A Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux is the fifteenth book in the Montgomery-Taggert series, but each book can be read as a standalone, so you don't really need to know anything about the series except that the Montgomerys are a bunch of perfect overachievers.  And that's what makes this book so special.  Dougless Montgomery is on vacation in England with her waste of space boyfriend and his terribly behaved daughter. She's a nice person, but Dougless doesn't have much of a backbone and she knows that she's different from all the super successful people in her family and she thinks that her boyfriend is the answer to her prayers.  Unfortunately, he's dismissive of her desires and needs and he's the parent of a huge teenage brat.  At some point, Dougless is abandoned by the duo of doom in an English church with no money, identification, or anything except the clothes on her back.  She begins crying on the the tomb of Nicholas Stafford, Earl of Thornwyck and suddenly he appears in full medieval armor.

So begins this tale of time travel.

Interesting characters: This book was first published in 1989 and was slightly updated in 2002, so there are some issues with the age. The earl is domineering and sexist, which isn't actually all that strange considering that he was supposed to be alive in the 1500s.  Dougless is a bit weak-willed in the early third of the book.  But! This book is a fabulous example of character growth.  By the end, both have recognized the strengths in the other.  A lot of criticisms of this book have to do with how spineless Dougless is and I understand that as a criticism, but you're definitely rooting for her by the end of the book and by the time she stands up to her sister, it's amazing.  I mean, this is a masterful example of how characters change through hardship.  

Believable conflict: So good. Of course they're going to have differences in culture, what with there being hundreds of years between their dates of birth. Of course they're not going to believe one another have actually time traveled into another year. Of course! It all seems accurate and believable and the best thing is that Deveraux somehow manages to do this without having the characters act out of their own characters, even when they're not in their own time.  

Emotional tension: Absolutely. You know that there's no way for them to end up together. I mean, he needs to stay in the 1500s to continue to support her family and she's a Montgomery and you know there's no way she'd stay in 1564 what with the dirty children, filthy towns, and poor hygiene.  They are hot for one another, for sure, but neither is going to sacrifice their own lives to be with the other and that ratchets up the emotional tension.

Happily ever after: This is another place that the book gets criticized. It's not really a happily ever after, is it?  They don't get to be together.  I found the ending satisfying, although I was disappointed that Nicholas never found his happiness. 

This is truly a masterpiece of the romantic genre. It's funny, quirky, and the rules of time traveling were simple, but we could figure them out. I remember enjoying Sweet Liar, another Deveraux joint in which there was some time slippage, so maybe that's just Deveraux's sweet spot. Regardless, I'm glad I read this book and will happily recommend it to others, particularly if they're into the time travel trope.

Time Salvager by Wesley Chu

Time Salvager by Wesley Chu is the story of James Griffin-Mars, a professional time traveler in a future world in which Earth is a toxic, mostly abandoned world and governments and huge corporations must go through time to salvage technology and goods needed for survival today. Our alcoholic, disillusioned, burnt out protagonist breaks several time traveling laws in an effort to attempt to save Earth (and, in a horribly cliched twist, get the girl).

I wanted to like this. I liked that Chu had clearly thought through the logistics of time travel. I liked that there was a bureaucratic agency in charge of regulating time travel. I liked that the writing was crisp and clear at the individual sentence level.  I liked the scene setting, especially of the future colonies and technology development (or lack thereof). 

But I didn't like it on the whole. I thought the brash, carefree Griffin-Mars was unlikable. I thought the novel was filled with cliches.
1) He basically broke time traveling laws because he just couldn't let this beautiful woman go. Gag.
2) Of course the government is super corrupt and beholden to giant corporations.
3) Earth is a disaster and we're turning all the other planets human colonize into equal disasters.
4) Only one person can save us! Our main character knows exactly how to get this person!
5) He sees ghosts. Talks to ghosts. Interacts with ghosts.  I just...can't.
6) Our hero gets into scrapes and just barely ekes out alive. Every. Time. He never just destroyed them or gets destroyed, but it's a near miss with him escaping in every scene.

So, props to Chu for attempting something this ambitious, but I'm not definitely not going to recommend this to anyone or pick up the next book in the series.