Doomsday Book

So much detail about everything! Crazy piles of words about characters running around in circles, making no headway whatsoever. Somehow, still, it was enjoyable to read and the characters were fun (except the overabundance of dudes in Oxford continuing into the mid 21st century – I could not keep them straight). Some ideas about the future were hard to swallow – jammed video phone lines which should have been solved by the internet, lavatory paper shortages which should have been solved by 3D printers, time travel being controlled by historians of all people! – but what fun would science fiction be without those crazy ideas that keep your suspension of disbelief muscles strong.

This was never really clear to me, but was the idea that SpoilerKivrin became infected with the ancient flu virus by digging in the tomb (to improve the historical accuracy of her fingernails) which Badri caught when he moved her arm right before she went through the net? But he must have been infected before then because the people at the dance club or whatever earlier were infected by him, but did he have any contact with Kivrin before then, especially the kind of contact that would specifically infect him and not anyone else during that period? I guess I stopped paying enough attention when the facts came together, but I thought there was an obvious explanation that was never spelled out, which was all the more frustrating because almost every other little thing is completely and entirely spelled out, several times, in this book.

The ending was brutal and horrible and heartbreaking, itself reason enough to read the book.