11/22/63: A Novel by Stephen King

I'm done! Finally! It took me forever to get through this book and I hated that.  I'm usually a fast reader, but for some reason with this book, I just couldn't get into it enough to want to keep reading.  So, I would read bits of it every day for about three weeks. That is just crazy to me! Ugh! And, I'm not even sure why I kept reading - well, that's not true. I suppose I thought the book would get better. Well, it didn't.  For me, this story never really took off and I do think that it could have been told in a lot less words than King used.  Seriously, he could have cut a few hundred pages from the book and we still would have had the same story - a man named Jake goes back in time to stop the assassination of JFK. 

I wasn't even sure I was going to write a post about this book, since I didn't really enjoy it all that much, but I figured why not.  I wanted to share what I liked and disliked about the book. Here goes:

Pros:

• The writing was typical King - engaging storytelling tone, interesting characters, and a solid story idea.  
• The idea of going back in time is always a fascinating one - and to go back with the purpose of changing history (preventing JFK's death) is pretty awesome.
• Learning about the late 50s and early 60s was neat - King is always authentic when describing time periods and locations - love that about him.
• I liked the character of Jake when he was actually doing something - changing Harry's future by changing his past; dating Sadie and living in Jodie; and enduring so much drama when he wanted to change the past.

Cons:

• Too much writing.  Seriously, the book is over 800 pages and a lot of those pages should have been edited down - a lot!
• Too much down time for Jake that I found extremely boring and actually made me dislike him at times.
• Too many unanswered questions, such as: Wouldn't Jake going back in time have changed Al's future?  Why was it that it only felt like he was gone for 2 minutes, when it was in fact several years?  Are there really that many portals scattered all around the world?  Did Al really not know about the card guys and how their cards changed colors? And, why was it that you could only go back to 1958 - why not earlier or later?
• I found other characters more interesting than the protagonist (Deke, Sadie, Harry, Al, Marina, etc.).
• Why wasn't Jake more careful about hiding his true identity? I felt like he was kind of smug about what he already knew was going to happen, because he was from the future.
• Why did certain characters have to die? Is the past really that vengeful?

Anyhow, those are a few of my pros and cons.  Looking at them, I can see that my real problem with the book was that I didn't find it as engaging as I had thought I would.  I've always enjoyed King's writing in the past, but for some reason I just didn't enjoy this book.  I did care for certain characters and I did like certain parts of the book, but overall, I felt let down in the end.  The book just seemed to drag on for far too long, and as a result, the story lagged.  I know I'm probably the only one who feels this way about 11/22/63, but so be it.  

And now, I'm off to find something new to read.  Murakami's not calling to me at the moment, so I may have to shelve Norwegian Wood for now.  Perhaps, something classic should be on the agenda for my next read. Hmmm. Either way, I hope everyone has a wonderfully happy Thanksgiving!!