11/22/63 By Stephen King

The book I’m reading right now is 11/22/63 by Stephen King.  It is an interesting book so far.  I’m about 150 pages into the approx. 850 page novel.

It is about a man who accidentally discovers some sort of time travel portal anomaly in the back of his supply closet.  The one ‘catch’ to this is that every time he uses it he goes back to the exact same September day in 1958 – he can’t change that.  Also, no matter how long he stays (5 min. or 5 yrs.) he always comes back 2 minutes later than the time he entered.

This man set out a plan to go and stop Lee Harvey Oswald who allegedly killed President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.  Only problem is, is that the assassination takes place 5 years after he enters the portal so he has to live in the past for five whole years before he stop the assassination. After being there for four years he gets very sick with cancer and he can’t stay any longer so he comes back and asks an acquaintance of his to finish what he started before the portal disappears forever.

Response Prompts

1. Tell what you like or dislike about the book and why.

So far there really is nothing that I dislike about this story but I’m still a little early in the book.  I do however like the notion of time travel and the whole “What if …” aspect of the story line.  I mean, what if you were able to go back in time and actually change the course of action of some large event?  Imagine the ramifications of such a doing.  Wow.

7. Tell about the connections that you made while reading the book. Tell how it reminds you of yourself, of people you know, or of something that happened in your life. It might remind you of other books, especially the characters, the events, or the setting.

So far the biggest connection for me is a text-to-text connection.  The main character goes back to 1958 and visits the town of Derry and runs into two teenagers which are able to help him find the location of some other people he is looking for.  Those teenagers are two of the main characters in another Stephen King novel called It.  If you never had read It you would never have made the connection and that would be O.K. because it really doesn’t impact the current story at all, but it is nice to have that reference there none-the-less, it kind of validates the other story too.

8. Write about the author’s style and how it makes you feel.

I really like Stephen King’s writing style.  He creates likable and believable characters that seem to be just like you and I who are thrown into unusual situations and/or circumstances.  I also like how he is able to put words together in ways that you’d never think of to describe something for example, “The ground now dropped away steeply into that tangled green riot of swampy ground that Toomey had called the Barrens.”  On their own the two words ‘green’ and ‘riot’, should not be together, yet they are and in doing that King makes the sentence pop with image of trees, bushes, etc. tangled together in such a mass of of hysteria that if it were possible it would seem like they were in the stages of a riot.  Absolutely brilliant!