First time I read it I was about 15 years old. That was a while back

In August of 2021 my science fiction book club group in Kansas did The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, and we had the joy of having her participate in our discussion. Here's a link. https://www.facebook.com/groups/kcsff.literati/ You will have to scroll down to August, 2021 to find the link, but then if you want you can watch the entire discussion. It's amazing. She talks about how certain characters came about to serve the needs of the plot. Wow.

I have had the enormous pleasure of meeting Connie at various s-f things, and she is simply the smartest, most acerbic, and funny person I have ever met. I actually got to see the eclipse in August, 2017, with her, her husband and their daughter. It was incredible. Courtney, her husband, is a now retired professor of physics and had his own telescopes and other equipment to view the eclipse with. We met up in Kearney, NE, and went to Ravenna to watch the eclipse. Ravenna had three different parks set up for people to watch the eclipse. We went to one that worked out quite well for us. I was utterly enthralled watching Connie talk to people there, and I kept on wanting to grab them and tell them, "This is Connie Willis!" But what I saw was that she had a good balance of being honored in the s-f world, and being completely anonymous everywhere else.

I re-read it last week and holy crap.

I first read it back in the 90s and it stuck in my head overall, but I had not remembered the populace's reactions in the modern timeline. Very uncomfortable, eh?