11/22/63

Started: 2024-03-01
Finished: Paused
Progress: 179 of 848 (21%)
Rating: Not Rated

Online Synopsis:

ON NOVEMBER 22, 1963, THREE SHOTS RANG OUT IN DALLAS, PRESIDENT KENNEDY DIED, AND THE WORLD CHANGED. WHAT IF YOU COULD CHANGE IT BACK? In this brilliantly conceived tour de force, Stephen King who has absorbed the social, political, and popular culture of his generation more imaginatively and thoroughly than any other writer; takes readers on an incredible journey into the past and the possibility of altering it. It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him away a gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than fifty years ago when Harry Dunning's father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer. Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life like Harry's, like America's in 1963 turning on a dime. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake's new life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine (where there's Dunning business to conduct), to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore. Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying.

Highlights transferred from Readwise

I no longer use Readwise, so I'm in the process of transferring the few quotes I collected during my free trial.

Personal Thoughts:

I started reading this book as a challenge on my fledgling Social Liza YouTube Channel (spoiler alert - I didn't actually end up posting the full video 😉). The challenge was something that has been on BookTube for a while, called Mammoth March, where you spend the month of March tackling the big books on your TBR (those that are over 800 pages long). I borrowed the book from the library, and couldn't finish it before I had to return it. It was a high demand book and couldn't be renewed. I did get it on Kindle Unlimited, but I still didn't finish it by month end. I ended up to Pausing my reading of it, but it is high on my #TBR2025 list, because I really did enjoy the writing, and I was interested in finding out what happens!

Fortunately I found at a used book sale at our local library for $4! I now own a barely used copy of the book and hopefully I can get back to finishing this book soon.