Connie Willis

Book club pick ☺

I have always been fond of Three Men in a Boat. It is incredibly nice to come back to To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is basically a love letter to Jerome K. Jerome, an idealised image of Victorian England, Victorian fiction, and Golden Age mystery novels. The author turns all of the above on its head and creates a delightful time travel romp. The stakes are high, too – it’s the whole space-time continuum, no less ;)

There is something to chuckle, laugh, or smile at on show more every page.

“ ’What on earth were you doing in the water?’
‘Drowning’, said professor Peddick.”

I loved the effects of time-lag (it happens when you do too much time travelling), which include attacks of maudlin sentimentality. Then you say stuff like “It’s no wonder they call you man’s best friend. Faithful and loyal and true, you share in our sorrows and rejoice in our triumphs…” ets etc. Lovely.

There are lots of misunderstandings and people talking at each other rather than to each other, because their brains went on a holiday. Really, I wouldn’t trust any of these characters with ordering a coffee for me, let alone time travel. But it also means that you are wonderfully entertained all the way through.

Things come together very satisfyingly by the end. Don’t look too closely, though, because time travel books rarely make sense. Just go with the flow, dear reader. Enjoy the flow of the Thames... :))) show less

A Lot Like Christmas is an updated and expanded version of Connie Willis's Miracle, a collection of her Christmas-themed fantasy and SF stories. None of the stories are original to this collection, though five of them are new additions since the 2000 publication of Miracle.

The stories are all delightful, but you do notice some similarities when you read them all in one batch. Willis is fond in her holiday stories of throwing together a pair of co-workers or acquaintances who realize, after show more a lot of zippy screwball-esque banter, that they are meant to be together. (The words, "Why, Miss Jones, you're beautiful!" don't actually appear anywhere, but they might as well.)

Nearly half of these stories are of that type, but the story details are different enough to keep you going despite the repetition. "Newsletter" mixes Christmas with Invasion of the Body Snatchers; "deck.halls@boughs/holly" imagines the future of party planning; "Now Showing" turns a trip to the multiplex into a spy caper. Best of this bunch, and for me the best story in the book, is "All Seated on the Ground," a story about choral singing and xenolinguistics.

Willis's stories borrow elements from Sherlock Holmes ("Cat's Paw"), The Twilight Zone ("In Coppelius's Toyshop"), and All About Eve ("All About Emily"). We're warned that a white Christmas isn't always all it's cracked up to be ("Just Like the Ones We Used To Know") and paid a visit from a very un-Dickensian Spirit of Christmas Present ("Miracle").

These are lovely bagatelles, and only the Grinchiest reader could fail to be amused. show less

Out of all of the silly books i've read, this might be the most ridiculous. I enjoyed it immensely as I am a woman with a deep passion for silly things.

Francie, who is in Roswell, New Mexico, to be the maid of honour for a UFO-themed wedding, has gone to the bride's car to retrieve something when ~~~whoosh~~~ she is abducted by an alien. This alien resembles a tumbleweed, is tentacled, intelligent, and he abducts other earthlings along their crazy route to go god-knows-where. The book is show more full of alien and cowboy tropes, encompassing John Wayne, Robert Redford, Las Vegas wedding chapels, one-armed bandits that no longer have arms, just a button, men in black (not the movie), and bridesmaid's dresses that glow in the dark.

It's a romance, it appears, a paean to friendship, and I read all day with chuckles and a purring cat. Four stars for being not only a good book, but a relaxant that helped me more than all the sedatives from Big Pharma. show less

“That's the trouble with books. They're timeless.” — Connie Willis, “To Say Nothing of the Dog”

How can you travel into the past without changing the present? That question lies somewhere in most time-travel novels, but few writers deal with it as directly as Connie Willis does in her 1998 novel “To Say Nothing of the Dog.” Another in her series of novels about historians of the future studying history by going back into the past, this screwball comedy of a story has as its main show more focus an attempt to correct missteps made by other historians that might affect the outcome of World War II.

Seemingly incidental events can have big consequences, and so historians Ned Henry and Verity Kindle are sent back to 1880s England to return a cat and to see that the cat's owner, a girl named Tossie, marries the right man, a mysterious Mr. C. They know from a diary fragment that she is supposed to meet Mr. C on a certain date, but how can they bring them together when they don't know who Mr. C. is, especially when she is already engaged to marry another man?

This all gets very confusing for anyone who is not Connie Willis, but she maintains the comedy and the banter at such a high level that readers shouldn't mind too much. Not as satisfying as her later comic novel “Crosstalk,” this is nevertheless an enjoyable romp through time, with stops in the Coventry cathedral during the 1940 bombing, a medieval dungeon and elsewhere along the way.

The novel is filled with literary references to William Shakespeare, P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and other writers. Ned even sees the three men in a boat that inspired “Three Men in a Boat.”

Willis also dips into metaphysics. Religion has been ruled nonessential by Ned and Verity's time — sort of how most governors and mayors regard it during the present virus — yet time itself becomes a mystical force that rules the universe. The "continuum wanted those things to happen," we are told.

Willis makes the same mistake made by a number of authors writing about the future — George Orwell, for instance — by not setting her story far enough into the future. Our historians are from the year 2057, time travel was invented between 2013 and 2020 and cats became extinct in 2004. Apparently she never imagined people would still be reading her novel in 2020 and finding those dates laughable. That's the trouble with books. They're timeless. show less