欧宝娱乐

To me, the exciting (read interesting) bits are the Antiques Roadshow moments anyway. I like the bric-a-brac of everyday life. That's part of why I like James White's books--they have a lot of 'the prince just drank a glass of water' moments. Details of what people eat, how they decorate their quarters, etc, are endlessly fascinating to me. Guess I'm just a frustrated set designer at heart, eh?

Your review is exactly was I was thinking (around page 550). She can have a translator (that sort of works) and a recorder implanted - and they have time travel, for god's sake! - but no GPS device?
OH WAIT THEY DO. Nice deus ex machina ya got there!

GPS isn't a lot of use without a satellite cluster. Some related device that uses triangulation without signals from outer space, maybe--but if there've been satellites at critical points for thousands of years, why don't we sense them--or collide with them?

Yeah and it takes the young boy to think about bringing the locator, how stupid are these historians!!

It鈥檚 strange how some people think this is such a great book

Haha, I really loved the book, but I have to admit, you do have a point about the locator.

Well to be fair, Kivron never expected to NEED a locator because she wasn't planning on being sick when she got to the middle ages, meaning she presumably could have remembered where the drop was herself. The flu caught the entire 21st century unawares, and her trip was hastily planned in the first place. Also they seemed to be very concerned with historical accuracy and I suppose there's the chance that a locator can't be concealed within the body and thus would be too much of a danger to carry around (WITCHCRAFT!).

I was much more annoyed by all the scenes of busy telephones, and people not answering their phones, and people passing out before delivering vital information. But I still really liked the end.

I think the point was that no sensible adult would bring present day technology to the middle ages, so a "locator" would be forbidden. It took the child with his Dennis the Menace pockets full of common sense to see them through (and a dollop of Artistic License on the part of the author). But I definitely concede the point that Willis accelerates some technologies (chemically based Babel Fish) while retarding others (cell phones). What she chooses to include and leave out may seem quirky to us, but they're the parameters of the artistic puzzle she's set herself. To me the vid-phone's technical specifics were less important than the notion Willis was trying to communicate which was "it is a time of systemic stress and communications are unreliable." It didn't seem such a stretch from "the phones are out" to "my cellphone can't get a signal" and I guess I made that mental translation on her behalf. The end result was the same- miscommunication and a breakdown of authority. That the technology used at the ending made all the previous fretting, searching, and obsessing over finding a particular location moot was kind of the POINT, wasn't it? There are so many things we take for granted when we rely on technology. It's that very simplicity ("Oh! If I only had the correct part this car would run!") that comprises the puzzle Willis laid out for her characters. No kidding if she'd had a "locator" we would have been spared 500 pages of speculation, but then there would have been no story...

i could have done with a few hundred fewer pages of frantic dithering about miscommunication...

I mostly agree. But I think she was striving for two things: a Catch-22-esque absurdity (lavatory paper), and a bit of social satire on the British in crisis (The Gallstone). I'm genuinely torn on what others and I identify as tedious, repetitive, or obsessive bits of narrative, except they did seem to heighten the "turn" where the later chapters kicked into higher gear by having a soporific effect... Were you in the protagonist's situation, you'd probably be doing exactly that sort of perseveration. And frankly, there's enough daily detail along the way for the inevitable surprise of why the trip went wrong to still pack a punch, and the systematic dismantling of the medieval world was genuinely heartbreaking. I wonder if the narrative had been shorter if we'd care as much. The failing might be in the "one note" nature of the present day parts of the narrative, could be the editing, inspiring the author to find ways to vary the bumbling in the present day part of the narrative.

It's funny, I'm reminded of the like 50 pages in the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series where the titular character shops at IKEA and the author goes into excruciating detail about what she shops for. Somehow he pulled it off, it wasn't until later on I thought "Did that character just SHOP for pages and pages and pages?" I've extended a similar readers' largess I suppose, to Willis for some of the atonality of her narrative. . .It's not a perfect book, but she definitely made me feel for her main character.

I read Sunshine a while back and the author loved to go on and on about making cinnamon buns, boy by the end of the book I just wanted to inhale about a dozen of them.
But even with Sunshine (and I loved that book), I really could have cared less about the baking parts.

I had no idea that book was sponsored by Sara Lee...

these were all-natural bakery creations! no sara lee crap!

i agree about sunshine but at least i like reading about food...

Darn, I getting that hungry feeling again. Look away!

My eyes!

skein wrote: "Your review is exactly was I was thinking (around page 550). She can have a translator (that sort of works) and a recorder implanted - and they have time travel, for god's sake! - but no GPS device..."

To be fair, when this book was written, cell phones were kind of a bulky, expensive curiosity and nobody had gps. Connie Willis is not a hugely technological writer, and the whole mechanism of time travel really isn't explored, either. I read her because she is witty and her characters are all just so engaging.

Chris wrote: "I think the point was that no sensible adult would bring present day technology to the middle ages, so a "locator" would be forbidden. It took the child with his Dennis the Menace pockets full of c..."

Connie Willis could maybe rewrite this a bit, and have a transformer damage bring down the cell phone network and the effect would be the same. In fifteen years people are going to read about phone booths and say "WTH is a phone booth?"

I don't have an issue with you trashing this book but I do have an issue with your comment about it's strange anybody likes this novel.

And, this novel won a host of awards. Who gets more weight on that? You or the specialists in the field? The latter.

I'm about one-third through, and it's a struggle. It seems, like Kivrin, to be going nowhere fast. But I am encouraged by the reviews of others, and will plough on. I hope it is worth it in the end!

@StoryTellerShannon: Sorry, we should defer to the opinions of 'specialists'? Is science-fiction a field of advanced study now?

The fact that a book riddled with so many lazy plot devices and meandering verbiage won anything at all is merely an indictment of the sloppiness of the awards industry. Worse, it's robbed us of the talent that Willis might have demonstrated if she'd sat down with an editor prepared to pare away the garbage.

The fact that this list of people is trashing a novel with obtuse commentary and no specific details makes me lean towards the specialists, so, yeah, that works for me. :)

P.S. And it's "strange" to me how some people dislike this book. Very strange. lol

Personally, I am not "trashing" this novel, and I do not dislike it. In fact, I like the story. I think that Connie Willis is very creative. I just wish that she had a better editor and proof-reader, and that she had condensed it down to about half the length. That would have made it a very powerful piece of writing. Having to read almost 400 pages before the story really gets going is no joke.

Exactly! And a future with time-travel and no cell-phones or voicemail? Still, it was entertaining for the glimpse into medieval life.

I like reading reviews right after finishing a book, especially the negative reviews that find flaws in the plot. yes I agree now that i've read it, why not give Kivrin a locator? but my answer would be that they didn't expect anything to go wrong and also they wanted to make her look authentic in the middle ages. My gripe with this book is not the past part but the future part which was quite boring.

everybody seem to love this book. The first chapter seemed to me like a study in stupid behaviour I simply couldn麓t leave the taste of imbecility that every character has in her novels

I would very happily take that autographed book off your hands

A locator like GPS? GPS is a system of 30+ navigation satellites circling Earth. We know where they are because they constantly send out signals. Your gps receiver listens for these signals and uses triangulation to learn your location. That doesn't seem very practical for the 13th century.