I have to read Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book for a Lit class I have, but the book was assigned over spring break, and I don’t care how good the book is, the last thing any college student wants to do on spring break is school work. This has unfortunately left me between a rock and a hard place. I need to be prepared to discuss the book in class, but I am only on page 177.
Can someone tell me what happened in this book? Go through the plot all the way to the very end, don’t worry about spoilers (put them in the box if you must) and please, please, give away the ending.
It was a good book, but not as good as “To Say Nothing of the Dog”, which was hysterical, especially if you ever read the Jerome book.
Everybody dies. The End
Do your own homework, kid
The Doomsday Book really is a worthwhile read, Dave. What’s the lit class?
I also enjoyed To Say Nothing of the Dog more. My husband and I read it aloud, and parts had us laughing to hard to read.
Funny. I remember doing work over just about every spring break I had as a student. You’re in college, kid. College involves a lot of reading, and they absolutely will not make assignments so that they conform to your schedule. Besides, you make it sound like reading a book is punishment. Just read the book already!
And here’s an oldie, but a goodie…
Number four on the top ten list of OPs most likely to be ridiculed…
It’s everybody’s favorite:
DO MY HOMEWORK!
Sorry kid, I could excuse your disinterest in school if they’d actually given you something difficult to do over Spring Break. But, all they asked you to do was read one flippin’ book. Complaining about that is unbelievably weak.
And a damn good book at that. I was coming in here to talk about and now I’m disappointed it’s a homework post. On the bright side at least, I’m heartened a bit at least that college professors are assigning it. Its the sort of book that usually gets overlooked.
At the end of the book, the ship sinks. It’s all a Titanic metaphor, really.
But don’t forget to mention the homicidal robots. They’re the best part of the whole book!
Read the book
Sorry about this, but I am going to have to put on my Mom hat and reply.
There are lots of thing I don’t want to do, laundry, driving kids back and forth to various places, cooking dinner when I am not hungry etc…The thing is, you stop whining and do it anyway. My kid did homework over Spring Break (which included reading Dickens), plus, she was battling a stomach flu.
So quit surfing the net and start hitting the book.
I am floored that this kid gets credit for reading a book that’s actually entertaining, and he’s whining about it. Doomsday Book is one of the best time travel books I’ve read, and being able to get graded on it is such a freakin’ luxury! I could see whinging if he had to read William Dean Howells or George Eliot, but Connie Willis? Come on!
And when justplainDave ventures into the business world, his bosses will not be amused whn he expalins that he just didn’t want to get a project done on time because it was the last thing he wanted to do.
Get a work ethic, kid.
Lsura, I found Passages to be the hardest damn book to get into. It took me about 150 pages to be going along with it, and if the author had been anyone but Willis, I’d have given up long before.
Oh, the OP: finish the book, kid, you won’t regret it.
I agree that To Say Nothing of the Dog was a far more fun read than Doomsday Book, but I don’t think either of them is better than the other, just different.
Hmmm. Well, I’d have to say “entertaining” isn’t a word I’d use to describe the book. More like maddening and horrifying. The “present” scenes were maddening, just like a bad dream where you try to talk to someone but they don’t listen and keep babbling on and on about their own stuff, and it’s going to end in disaster but you can’t convince them.
And of course, the Black Plague is endlessly entertaining.
Maybe it was just the mood I was in, but the whole novel was like a suffocating nightmare. I was ready to put a bullet in my brain by the end.
But Lemur, you say all that like it’s a bad thing!
I’m with gobear: the OP should consider himself lucky to get to read this for an English course. You’ll get more out of it than you possibly could partying through Spring break. Get out there and expand your mind, already.
Trout or salmon?
The Doomsday Book holds a priveleged place in our household, as it is one of few books I have forced on my daughter that she enjoyed. The Wife thought it was a very heavy book for a twelve-year-old.
I have the ten-year-old reading **Watership Down ** and Silverlock right now, but she still prefers Animorphs…
I agree, though I can sort of see where the OP is coming from. I read insatiably as a kid (still do), but I hated being told what to read. I wanted to read what I wanted to read, not what they wanted me to read. I’m actually glad that I was never assigned *The Doomsday Book, because then I might not have enjoyed it so much.
But still, justplainDave, I have to go with the majority here: just read the damn book. It’s good. Really.
Oh, and another vote for To Say Nothing of the Dog as well.
For shame, fellow Dopers! Our purpose here is not to judge, but to pass along our wealth of knowledge. It is not our place to deprive humanity of our wisdom and insight. I, for one, intend on giving justplainDave the information he so richly deserves.
THE STORY: The Black Death arrives at Lady Elwys’s estate, and one by one members of the household begin to die off. Soon virtually everyone is stricken by the disease. Then, however, Kirvin makes a horrifying discovery: it turns out that the seemingly innocuous “Father Roche” is in fact the notorious 14th century madman “Roche the Reaper.” Using the Black Death as a cover, this proto-serial killer poisoned hundreds with “healing draughts” he brewed from local herbs and flowers. Realizing that the Reaper has been feeding the family poison, meaning to kill them all, Kirvin flees from the manor house with the little girl Agnes.
They run to the nearby village, which is in the midst of celebrating the Festival of the Fool. The contrast between the happy, boisterous village and the brooding, death-haunted estate, stalked by the malignant Roche, forms one of the most striking sections of the book.
Roche eventually tracks Kirvin and Agnes to the town. In the climax of the medieval portion of the book, Kirvan and Roche confront each other in a bell tower of the local church: after a struggle, Roche falls to his death and “the Reaper” is no more. (In the 21st century section of the book we learn that in the 16th century the church was converted to a school, which has been known as the School of Roche ever since.)
Meanwhile, in the 21st century portion of the book, Mary learns of Gilchrist’s secret and illegal plans to use the time travel program to turn the past into a tourist amusement park. Gilchrist, however, discovers that she knows, and so to shut her up he exposes her to the new virus that’s sweeping Cambridge.
Mary goes into a coma, but not before passing on to Colin the information about Gilchrist, along with the pass codes for the time machine. (She got them from the feverish Badri by using hypnosis.) Colin breaks into the research lab and opens the net: he goes back in time, and brings both Kirvin and Agnes back to the present.
Using an herb she found in the past, Kirvin heals Mary (and thus discovers an antidote that saves millions.) Gilchrist is arrested, and as he’s lead away by the police he mutters about how he would have succeeded if it hadn’t been for that interfering septuagenarian. The book concludes with Kirvin getting her degree and Mary announcing that she’s adopting little Agnes as her own.
THE END
You forgot the bit with the hippy and the great dane.
And the homicidal robots. You can’t leave them out!
You people are just evil. 
There’s one thing I didn’t understand about the ending. You know how, at the end, we find out that Mary is descended from Roche? Did Willis put that in for a kind of “redemption” theme? Roche kills Agnes’s family, and now his descendant gives Agnes a new family. Or was she trying to say that we have to be judged as individuals, because the evil Roche was the ancestor of the noble Mary.
You know, that would probably make a good essay topic.