Rating: 
Summary: Deserving of the Hugo and Nebula awards it won, and more.
Review: This exceptionally well written and researched novel takes place in a future where time travel is routine, and an expected part of the college curriculum. But for Kivrin, a bright and dedicated student of medieval history at Oxford, everything goes awry. When she embarks on a research project, and she's mistakenly sent back to the wrong time by bungling academics and improperly inoculated to the plague by inattentive medics who unwittingly unlease the black death among the university and its community.Kivrin, along her contemporaries and the medieval people she meets, are compelling and believable, the shifting perspective on time and language, and the level of emotion the story generates keeps the reader enthralled. Loaded with subplots and mysteries, the story is most gripping, and seemed quite plausable to me.
Rating:
Summary: Dooms Day Book
Review: Connie Willis is amazing! I'm not a science fiction reader and yet I stumbled across this book and found myself totally engrossed from the first page to the last. To Say Nothing of The Dog is another one of hers that's absolutely wonderful. By all means, buy these two books.
Rating:
Summary: Great !!!
Review: This is one great book. Don't get frightened away by SF category. I'm a hardcore SF reader, but this story has nothing to do with SF. But it is wonderfull.
Timetravel is a normal thing in a near future. But it's nothing like Stargate or Dr.Who. Ok, it's situated in England, but that's all.
Timetravel is a normal thing for historians to go on-site in the year of their interest. The "drop" the reader wil follow is bringing us to the 14 century. And off course something goes wrong. What? No spoiler here!
The characters are great, you love mr. Dunworthy and Kirvin from the beginning, and Gillchrist.....yeah, typical guy.
And the invention of Conny Willis is "Slippage". A great way to handle the Timetravel-paradox. (but it could also take all the suspense away! ;-) )
Anyway, this book keeps you up all night, so be warned.
Rating: 
Summary: Precontrived Notions
Review: Looking back on my life I can remember many times that I thought to myself "Self, why are you wasting your precious time here on earth doing what you're currently doing?" As I get older and time becomes more precious, I try to get myself into these situations as little as possible. All I can say about reading the Doomsday Book is "oops, I did it again". As far as books go, I try to protect myself by sticking to the recommendations of respected reviewers, (in this case the clerk at the local (bookstore), or winners of prestigious awards (Hugo). But in this case all that care and concern was circumvented by what was one of the worst books I have ever read; maybe not the worst in absolute terms, but certainly the worst relative to expectations. In the interest of not wasting any more of my aforementioned precious time let me be succinct. The characters were stupid, uninteresting, and predictable. The plot (I use the word "plot" with tongue firmly implanted in cheek) devices were shamelessly contrived, endlessly repetitive, and...Oh, did I say repetitive already? The supposed historically accurate perspective was laughable. I could be historically accurate too if I wrote a story that essentially takes place in one room and sometimes the woods. This was a terrible book in almost every way...except maybe weight. It was pretty heavy; I'll say that for it. (...) What a waste of time.
Rating:
Summary: Hopefully just that: a GREAT! read.
Review: I must of read over three thousand and twenty six great reads in my life and all of them were just that, including many Spidermans and The Incredible Hulks and a Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. This one read, The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, is definitively science fiction as it has a time machine in it, and so I am disinterested in hearing anybody say it isn't science fiction. Fortuitously, most people realize just that. So anyway, The Doomsday Book is my very favorable read of all the reads I must of ever read, and hopefully all those sad, hopeless people who don't appreciate it yet will hopefully realize what a great read it is, when they hopefully reread it again and again. (One possibilistic analyzation of why they didn't like it is it makes you half to really think and they didn't want to half to really think.)
Rating:
Summary: Haunting...
Review: I've read close to a 1,000 books during my time here on Earth, but only a couple of dozen have stayed with me the way that Doomsday Book has. In a ranking of time travel books, this would probably have to be on or near the top. Not only does Willis generate an engaging story, but she creates real flesh-and-blood characters, not cardboard at all, and breathes life into them. And as the book is about the Black Plague, you can imagine how moving it is to watch these characters try to come to grips with the plague (and often fail). Worth reading at least once!
Rating:
Summary: judged fairly, it falls very short
Review: I am not a "medievalist" (whatever that is supposed to mean), so I can't vouch for the historical accuracy or inaccuracy of the scrap of medieval life depicted here, but having read this book, I can testify that it IS a mere scrap. As far as depiction of medieval life goes, it risks almost nothing. We are essentially confined within one house and within one half of a household (the men have been called away and never return). Science fiction as a whole tends to allow little character development or its character development tends to seem gratuitous. This is because science fiction necessarily concerns itself with the effect of scientific technology and that effect tends not to be an effect on individuals in particular. Since, despite its marketing, THE DOOMSDAY BOOK is obviously NOT science fiction, it is not so constrained, and its characterization ought to be judged by the the standards of mainstream fiction, not by the standards of a genre that has other, compensating, attractions. Judged thus, it falls very short. No character in the entire book is "rounded" or fully developed. The only character that ever interested me, as a character, was the younger of the two children of the medieval household, and she interested me only briefly, in passing. (American Heritage, first edition: "disinterested, adj. Free of bias and self-interest; impartial." "Disinterested" does NOT mean "uninterested"; "UNINTERESTED" means "uninterested", and when this BOOK means "uninterested" it should SAY "uninterested". In my opinion, we are fully justified in rating a book that abuses the simple, common term "disinterested" and others, as this book does, one star only, and on this basis only. There is NO excuse for it. This is not, however, as it happens, why I have rated THE DOOMSDAY BOOK one star only.)
Rating:
Summary: Moving and realistic
Review: As a medievalist, I find Willis' depiction of life in the middle ages to be believable. I like the author's approach to the time period. The people are quite different from us...obviously and unapologetically NOT modern. Yet, Willis convincingly links the past and the future in more ways than one. I find her future, with the bureaucratic tangles and incompetence, to be quite believable as well. Additionally, her characters are engaging and realistic. I particularly liked Mr. Dunworthy (and enjoyed his reappearance in other books) and Father Roche. She didn't resort to any of the tired stereotypes of the middle ages. I was particularly glad to see her depiction of genuine piety. Very well done. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Are we there yet?
Review: I wanted to like Doomsday Book. I respected the five years of work that went into it, the Hugo and Nebula awards it earned, and the recommendation by friends. I expected something rich and detailed, something that would draw me in and not want to let go. What I got was a "whole lotta nothing." Had this book been a third of its near 600-page length it might have been a tight, moving story. As it is, the characters have seemingly eons of time to wander through, both forwards and backwards. The book contains two stories running in parallel. In the 'modern' one (actually several decades from now) Kivrin, a young Oxford historian, is sent back in time to 1320 despite great misgivings by her professor, James Dunworthy. Dunworthy spends the next several weeks trying to make sure she's all right and can return home, a formidable task due to an epidemic that has broken out at the college and a hopelessly ignorant department head who organized the 'drop.' The second story deals with Kivrin's experiences in the past, and her own battles against ignorance and illness. The ever-present questions are, "will Kivrin get home?" "will she die in the past?" "will everyone die in the future?" and "can any of this be stopped?" When I say "ever-present" that's exactly (unfortunately) what I mean. 200 pages into Doomsday Book I thought that I'd never read so much of so little. 400 pages in, when then modern folks learn an important (and obvious since about page 20) fact about Kivrin's trip back in time, I thought that at last we could move forward. And we did, a little, but not much, and not enough. So what fills 600 pages? The same questions, over and over again. The same characters, exhibiting the same behavior that they did in their first appearance. The same technical information, repeated constantly. And a minimal story, about two separate epidemics. Even these are reported more as casualty lists than personal reactions to illness and death. Ms. Willis gives us little opportunity to truly inhabit either world, holding us at a distance with endlessly repeated facts. The large group of characters never seem more than one-dimensional props, conveniently there to manipulate the story when needed. The biggest question mark is Dunworthy and his obsession with Kivrin. His colleagues and friends are dying around him and he thinks only of a student, not even his personal student. Why? He doesn't develop this feeling over the course of time; he's plopped in that way and stays so until the end. Nothing changes, the other deaths barely touch him; it's Kivrin start to finish. And we're never told why. I thought at least that we'd be treated to some kind of love story, but no. It just is what it is, another fact we're to accept. What is perhaps most aggravating about Doomsday Book is that some of the facts it loves are manipulated so as to make little or no sense. For instance, a large part of the book deals with the difficulty of getting someone on the phone, leaving a message, or even finding a phone to use. Dunworthy resorts to having characters wait in his room to take messages for him while he's out. This would seem absurd even today, and I would imagine that in an age where time travel is possible people would not have discontinued the use of cell phones, voice mail, or even answering machines. The Medieval world has incongruities as well, as when Willis describes a landscape after a fresh snowfall, where roads show up as black lines. How is this possible? A) it just snowed. B) Everyone is dead, so no one has traveled lately. C) presumably the plow hasn't just gone through. These roads would be covered in white snow, just like everything else. It's obvious to us, but it's crucial to the story that they be black, so they're black. The late film critic Gene Siskel had a wonderful question when reviewing a movie; "Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?" I'd apply that here in this form; "Is this book more interesting than the author's research materials?" I'd have to say no; I did learn things about Medieval life, but found myself wanting to read the original sources in order to complete the sketchy picture. Kivrin arrives in the past in a haze of illness, but the fog never seems to clear, and we see little of how this life actually affects her beyond a historical-document feeling. The most ridiculous element is perhaps that she's supposed to be viewed as a saint sent by God to help the locals through this time. This is not shown to us by anything the characters do or say; it's simply stated to us. Without backing it up with actions or reactions it means nothing. It's just another fact, weak and debatable.
Rating: 
Summary: Flawed but haunting
Review: I agree with many of the comments I've read about this book being overlong, the characters (especially the "modern" Brits) being largely uninteresting, the sequences in 2054 being boring, etc. etc., but . . . . the description and handling of the plague, the unexpected language difficulties and the scenes in 14th century England somehow were so compelling to make up for the other flaws and make this a definite recommendation. The early scenes where Kristin can't interpret what people are saying (nor they her) was nothing less than chilling. What I can say about this book, unlike most, is that it sticks in your mind for days and weeks afterwards. A truly unique novel.
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