Chapter One Hundred Sixty-Two: To Say Nothing of the Dog

So next in my Connie Willis series was To Say Nothing of the Dog, another time travel book, though only loosely related, so you could read this without having read Doomsday Book and be totally fine, though I think reading them consecutively really allows one to see the themes that connect both stories (and that also run through Blackout and All Clear, her subsequent time travel books, which I'm reading presently).
But to say nothing more of these extraneous details, I'll return to the book at hand, which is by far the most light-hearted of Willis's time travel books.  Set mainly in upper class Victorian England, this book is part comedy of manners, part romance, and a big part mystery.  I hadn't really thought of it as a mystery book until this time around, when it really hit me that the whole story is one big whodunnit: what happened to the Bishop's Bird Stump, and when, and how, and why? Our intrepid time travelers have been assigned to find out, and as they work frantically to track this hideous Victorian artifact through history, they also have some hilarious misadventures along the way involving cats and dogs, butlers and boats, and the side effects of too much time traveling (extreme sentimentality).
The title references Jerome K. Jerome's delightful Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and for those who have read that book, its influence is clear.  For those of you who haven't read it, I highly recommend it, as well as To Say Nothing of the Dog, which manages to be both funny and thought-provoking.

Chapter One Hundred Sixty-One: Doomsday Book

So to counter the gloom of February and to add to my tradition of reading Connie Willis's Blackout and All Clear during the third week of this short and dark month, I've decided to make the whole month Connie Willis month!  I like February better already.  So I started, naturally, with the first full-length book in her time traveling sequence, Doomsday Book.  I have read it and reviewed it here before, but since Connie Willis is one of my favorite under-appreciated authors, I'm more than pleased to review it again and I hope someone will decide to try it out.  I will say, Doomsday Book is not for the faint of heart: there are all sorts of illnesses, and a lot of characters to keep track of, and as the title suggests, there is plenty of doom.  Also, there's time travel, so you have to be open to that to enjoy this book, which is on the longer side.  But I think the rewards of the book more than outweigh these elements: the plot is original and intricate (well, intricate is a benefit as far as I'm concerned, anyway), the main characters feel very human and likable (with a few love-to-hate types thrown in for comedic relief), and the settings (mid-21st century Oxford and 14th century Oxfordshire) are certainly out of the ordinary, at least in terms of what I generally read.  (Maybe there are lots of books out there set in either or both of these places and I simply have yet to discover them...)  I find all of Connie Willis's novels to be absorbing, drawing me in and letting me forget it's February, at least while I'm reading them, so if you're open to time travel and enjoy long books with complicated plots (think Diana Wynne Jones, though I don't think she ever wrote about time travel), I would definitely recommend Connie Willis, and you may as well start from the beginning of her time travel sequence, which is the magnificent Doomsday Book.

Chapter One Hundred Sixty: Quiet

So Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking has been vaguely on my to-read list for some time, and then I learned recently that a young readers' edition aimed at middle and high school students is being published this year.  Being the kind of person I am, I figured I'd want to read the young readers' edition and I decided it would be even more interesting if I could compare it to the original edition for adults.  I found Quiet to be interesting and highly readable, integrating data from personality psychology and related fields with accounts of people who have used their introversion to great success and with a sort of cultural studies perspective on American society and its preference for extroversion, especially as seen in modern businesses (open floor plans) and educational systems (group projects).  Another of its strong points is Cain's repeated insistence that no one is purely an introvert or purely an extrovert (think of a spectrum) and that people do not act exactly the same all of the time in all situations everywhere without fail.  If you enjoy reading theories about what makes people tick, Quiet is a great option.  I suppose if you are an extrovert surrounded exclusively by other extroverts, there may not be much of interest in this book, but if you are yourself more on the introverted side of things, or if you have close relationships with introverts, this book is a fascinating read and a useful explanatory tool as well.