Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1)
by Connie Willis
I'd give it 3.5 if I could---it's good. It's well-written and interesting, even though I have no interest in anything that happened in Europe between 1000 and 1800 CE. But the end is a killer.
I think the problem---though problem is an overstatement---I had with this book is that it's almost too simplified. Not the characters, not their relationships, not the situation... but when you finish it, you realize that you can really sum up the entire point in a sentence. Perhaps that's also part of the point. I suppose that on one level, Doomsday Book is a story about ordinary people, and on the other it's a big, highly impersonal philosophical question.
It's also interesting having read this after To Say Nothing of the Dog, which starts with the same premise but is a completely different book.