baronessekat | 2020 Popsugar Reading Challenge: A book with "twenty" in the title

11/22/63 by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I went into this book a bit skeptical. I stopped reading King a good 25 years ago (maybe closer to 30) because he was getting too epic with the tellings when it could have been easily cut in half and still been a good story. I still think it. This book was over 31 hours long. But while I think it could have easily been cut by a good 10 hours and been fine, it wasn't as tedious as I expected. It's not going to get me back to regularly reading King again but it hasn't driven me away again.

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2011, 35 year old Jake Eppings is a recently divorced English Teacher in Maine. He regularly frequents a run down diner and one day the owner suddenly looks much older than he did the day before. Al, the owner, informs Jake that he has found a "rabbit hole" as he calls it that takes him to 1958 - which is where he goes to get his supplies and able to keep his prices so low. Al goes on to say that whenever he returns it's only 2 minutes later in the current time.

Jake has trouble believing it but it's hard to argue that Al has aged seemingly overnight. Al confesses that he spent over 4 years in the past in an attempt to try to stop the JFK assassination, but that lung cancer is stopping him. Al convinces Jake to go back and do what he couldn't - stop Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963. Jake eventually agrees and starts a strange adventure to try to circumvent history and change the world - but at what cost?

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