Title: 11/22/63
Author: Stephen King
Pages: 849
Date: 1/25/25
I chose this book because a surprising number of fellow prisoners strongly recommended this book, saying that it was one of their favorite books ever. I had never even heard of it. I also tried reading another Stephen King book two weeks ago, didn’t like it and quit reading. I used to be a big Stephen King fan in the late 80’s & early 90’s and wondered if I had outgrown his books or his writing no longer fit me. To summarize – this book was fantastic! I finished it in about 1.25 days; even staying awake late last night with a booklight to read it. I have been reading “heavy” non-fiction books for the past three weeks and needed to give my brain a break.
What I learned from this book: The story involves a time portal from the present (2011) to the past (11/9/58) and it originates from the pantry room of Al’s Diner. Sidenote: my birthday is November 9 and one of my favorite restaurants in my hometown is Al’s Diner. When you step into the past, you can stay as long as you want, but when you return, only two minutes of the present have lapsed. It appears as if nothing really changes in the present if you go back multiple times. Al is dying of cancer, so he asks his friend Jack to go back to 1958 and set himself up to stop the JFK assassination. Most of the book follows Jack as he determines if Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Jack & his girlfriend (Sadie) ultimately stop the assassination just seconds before it would have happened, but Sadie is killed instead of President Kennedy. When Jack returns to the future, everything from his present has deteriorated to something almost apocolyptic. As it turns out, there is a guardian of the portal. He strongly encourages Jack to return to the past one more time and not fix anything and then return to the present, which he does, returning the present to what he knew when he left the first time. He finally makes one last return to the past to visit Sadie who he had fallen in love with in the early 60’s, even though she is now 76 and he is 42. As it turned out, Sadie was an extremely powerful force for good, possibly offsetting the negative aspects of Kennedy’s assassination.
The following lessons increase the prospect for success after prison:
1) This book relates well to prisoners because I am sure many (if not all) of us would like to return to when the crime happened so that we could make a different and better choice. We know tha you cannot really go back in time to repair what went wrong – no matter how bad we want this to happen. What happened is the reality; there is nothing that you can do about it except sit in prison, focusing on the future and how to build on that. That is what I am doing by reading a book every two days.
2) There are unknown repercussions to any action that you take. The important thing is to always do the right thing so you don’t have to worry about what happens afterward. When Al went back to stop the assassination, he did not expect any negative repercussions from stopping JFK’s assassination, only the positive aspect. When Sadie died, this upset the apple cart of the world and causing an apocalyptic outcome multiplied over time.
3) There were not as many lesson from a fiction book as there are from non-fiction books.