Funny story: a number of years ago I read Blackout by Connie Willis, one of my favorite authors. I really love Connie Willis, even though there have been some disappointments (Remake is way too obvious and Promised Land. . .I don’t even want to talk about it). But when she’s on, I’m nuts for her writing. Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, which are curiously tied together by a time-travel theme and some shared characters, are two of my favorite contemporary novels, in spite of them being very […]
Haven’t read the original being spoofed, so I missed a lot of jokes
This was a good book that I would have liked an abridged copy of. I read Doomsday Book last year for #CannonBookClub, but this was a slightly different flavor, although set in the same universe of Oxford using time travel for history-studying purposes. Through a series of convolutions, Ned ends up in the Victorian era (not his specialty) trying to help fix a timeline incongruity. He’s working with a classmate, Verity Kindle (excellent name), who has already been back and forth to the era multiple […]
Connie Willis is OBSESSED with communication.
I really, really ended up enjoying this, but it was touch and go there for a bit. Connie Willis’s writing always has this distinct, relentless tone to it, and it gets under your skin until you see where it’s going. I’ve had that same experience with all the books I’ve read by her, although the tone takes a different specific tenor every time. In Doomsday Book it was the tedium of death. In To Say Nothing of the Dog it was the farcical nature of […]
Oxford Temporal Historians At It Again
I really wanted to title this review “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego”. Not for any correlations to the bible story in To Say Nothing of the Dog: Or How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump at Last by Connie Willis. Because the characters reminded me of former high school classmates of mine who received those nicknames our freshman year of high school from a very cranky history teacher. Much of the struggles of Ned, Terrence, and Cyril through the early portions of the book reminded me […]
Bumbling about Victorian England with a bulldog and a cat named Princess Arjumand.
After I read Doomsday Book a couple of years ago, a bunch of people told me that this one was much lighter in tone, and funny, but I didn’t realize it would be an almost straight up farce at points. To Say Nothing of the Dog takes place two years after the events of Doomsday Book, but either book can be read on its own without regard for the other. Oxford historian Mr. Dunworthy is the only character of any note who plays a role […]
I am time-lagged, but this is a great book
To Say Nothing of the Dog was delightful, especially reading it so quickly after the extended bleakness of Doomsday Book. I liked the latter, but To Say Nothing of the Dog had humor, levity, and, importantly, seemed much more edited. The story follows Ned Henry, a future historian who, along with the entire time travel research group at Oxford, has been enlisted by a demanding, omnipresent, and stubborn benefactor to rebuild the previously destroyed Coventry Cathedral in Oxford. Why, you ask? Well, her great-great-great grandmother […]
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