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.