I was having problems with the emails getting cut off so I wouldn't get the full day's story and wouldn't realize until the next day when it was apparent I had missed something. Substack seems more reliable.

Gmail put them in promotions a couple of times. I kept dragging them back to the main inbox until gmail got the hint.

BTW I am about halfway through Doomsday Book and it is as good as I remember. I might like it even better as an audiobook - I was definitely not pronouncing those 14th century names correctly in my head, and hearing Middle English or Latin or whatever makes a different impression on my brain than reading words I can’t understand with my eyes. But it can be hard to remember that the pandemic the characters mention and the Oxford quarantine are not our pandemic. When Finch says they are running out of toilet paper, or someone mentions that Americans won’t stand to be told where they can and can’t go and that’s why so many of them die, or the nurses run out of face masks I have to pause for a bit

Oh wow t, that’s an interesting reminder, I don’t think I’ve re-read that in the past few years.

I don’t think I’ve read it this century. I definitely forgot a lot.

Yeah, there are some moments in that book that are frighteningly on the nose for having been written several years in advance!

Finished listening to the Oxford Time travelers. Glad I did it! I had never read any of them as a series before. Pretty much read them more or less as they came out - Firewatch in some Year’s Best anthology, and it made enough of an impression on me that Connie Willis was a name I looked for in libraries and used bookstores. Which is how I got Doomsday Book. To Say Nothing of the Dog I think I actually have a hardback copy lying around somewhere. And Blackout/All Clear I read when it was nominated for a Hugo (I think I voted for it but istr was up against other books I also liked very much so I’m not positive about that). Anyway, point is they were all pretty spread out over time and I tended to think of them as a shared universe and didn’t even try to remember continuity or anything. So reading them all at once was fun for that. There’s only 6 years between Firewatch and Blackout in Dunworthy’s timeline!

And now I have opinions about what was really going on with the slippage and so forth and hope there will be another book that proves me right. In short, I think that Polly, Merope and Michael getting trapped in the blitz are more like Carruthers getting trapped in Coventry than Ned and Verity getting shoved around by the net. Also, we don’t see Oxford at all after Dunworthy goes back to pull Polly out, we just see Colin when he is on drops and I am intensely curious what was going on all that time. Was the 8 years Colin mentions 8 years in Oxford or his personal timeline? What did Ishiwaka think was going on? Etc.

That said, I am also pleased Willis isn’t as prolific as some people. Having something like a decade between books is nice for my ability to keep up, if not my ability to remember what happened last time.

I think my favorite Connie Willis is Bellwether.

I love Bellwether a lot. Good stuff.

There was also a shorter piece, The Moon Blues, which I remember enjoying although a lot of the details are a blur at this point.