11.22.63 Paperback – International Edition, January 1, 2012

King's best story to date. As an author myself, I highly recommend this book from another master story teller.

I have not started reading this yet, so I don't really know if it will be good, but I am sure it will be

You ever read something and get sad that it wasn't longer? Welp, this was one for me. I know this is fiction but there is some history stuff i learned from this book. Will definitely read again.

This was my first time reading a Stephen King book. The plot and storyline were fascinating. I thoroughly enjoyed the story. My only complain was the overuse of profanity. Ugh!!!

MAY CONTAIN SOME SPOILERSI am not normally a Stephen King fan. Indeed, believe it or not, as avid a reader as I am this is the first King book that I have ever read. So I cannot compare it in any form to any of his earlier works, and there are evidently references to some of those earlier works that I have therefore missed.It doesn't matter. This is simply one of the most engrossing novels I have ever read - and I have read more than I care to remember. For all its great length, I wish it had carried on for another several hundred pages. In part a time travel saga, a love story and a wonderfully evocative rendition of an America which has long gone, this book sweeps you along from the opening sentence to its touching finale.Okay, so there are a few minor quibbles. As some critics have noted, the minutae of the Oswald family's daily life could have been trimmed. King's almost endless criticism of smoking gets a bit boring (I freely admit that I am a smoker), and you have to wonder why, really, does Jake/George wait until the last minute (almost literally) to try and stop Oswald from assassinating the President.However, none of this is remotely enough to justify less than the maximum five star rating. Time travel stories always have to be taken with a large pinch of salt, and it is to King's credit that he does not even try and explain why walking out the back of a diner in 2011 would lead anyone to come out in the same spot in September 1958. That's what is needed to make the story work, so it just as. Similarly, who knows and who cares why only two minutes elapse in 2011 even of the time-traveller stays in the past for more than five years. Just accept that that is how the author wants it, and move on.I must say that I found the depiction of America in 2011 after Kennedy's live was saved to be a touch unlikely and a bit over-the-top, but you can always mentally substitute your own vision. We will never know what the present would be like had JFK not died in 1963, and King's apocalyptic vision could be just as accurate as someone else's vision of a utopia in which everybody under the suns gets on just fine with one another. Now that is also not very likely, but that's the point. It's fiction, and nobody will ever know.All in all, this is a hard book to put down. The author's wonderfuly detailed picture of small town (and big city) American life in the late 50s and early 60s is so good as to carry the reader there. No false notes are struck as Jake/George works his way towards Texas and passes the time between 1958 and that fateful November day in 1963. On all counts this is a memorable book, and I recommend it enormously - even (especially?) to non-King addicts.

Not his best work, but a good historical read.I just bought Salem's Lot to reread and that's far better.

Imagine you had the ability to travel back in time to 1960, what would you do? Perhaps you might want to make the world a better place? Perhaps you would try to spend your time trying to warn people of Global Warming or the 6th Extinction Event? Perhaps you might take some 21st century technology back to the 1960s and try to speed along humankind's technological development? Or perhaps you might be like the protagonist of this novel, Jake Epping and decide that your best course of action is to spend your time in the 1960s shacked up in seedy rooms eavesdropping on Lee Harvey Oswald, as you work out when, if and how you should shoot Oswald in order to save the US President? To me this seems like a pretty stupid thing to do. Why is American culture so obsessed with the idea that it can solve its problems with a gun?Stephen King attempts to make Jake Epping out to be a guy we can all relate to, a smart, sensitive man, an ordinary guy, who is trying to make the world a better place, but I just couldn't buy it. Firstly, Jake is convinced to take on another man's plan to kill presumed JFK assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, with very little intense contemplation of why he would want to undertake this crazy goal. The logic is simple to the point of stupid: kill Oswald, stop Vietnam, make the world a better place. Ok? He literally spends a night sleeping on the proposal before saying yes to it. Secondly, he figures the best course is to just shoot the guy. King does try to convince us why shooting Oswald is the only way to go, but the attempts are pretty lame. For example, at one point in the novel, some old man who seemingly Epping knows only as a casual acquaintance, advises him that people like Lee Harvey Oswald, that is, obsessive "crazy" people, can only be stopped if you kill them. Gotta love this American ethos that villainy can only be prevented by shooting someone dead or blowing someone up.Don't worry, Jake's time in the 1960's isn't spent just trying to work out if and when he should kill Oswald, he also finds time to kill some other people for reasons totally unrelated to the assassination of JFK and he finds time to fall in love with a woman who he spends most of the novel lying to. He also makes time to bankroll his stay in the 1960s by doing illegal gambling deals with shady bookmakers. Hopefully, you get the picture, Jake Steed is a total idiot. Yet Stephen King never comes even close to suggesting that we should identify our protagonist as basically being an idiot. Sure, the aim of the novel is to show that his actions are in some sense misguided, but Jake is always meant to be a sympathetic character. I found it hard to sympathize with him, especially as the story is narrated to us from Jakes first-person perspective and King never allows us to see that Jake might be seriously wrestling with his actions. We are meant to impressed by Jake, his tenacity, compassion and sometimes his coolness as he plays the rebel with a cause.This book is also way too long, at 720 pages, I felt a much better story could have been told in around 200 pages or even less. If you are interested in in the history of the JFK assassination and questions around whether Oswald killed Kennedy alone, or perhaps even, not at all, given the length of the novel, I felt this whole question is never worked into the story in any deep and interesting way.There are good aspects to this novel, the last 100 pages or so of the book are haunting and touching, but it takes a long time to get there. The opening part where Jake is in King's mythical, Lovecraftian town of Derry is interesting. This contrasts, however, with Jake's time in the "American Pie" town of Jodie. King tries to contrast the town of Jodie with spookiness of Derry and the ugliness of Dallas, yet I found the time we spend in Jodie rather hokey, a sentimental stereotype of the good American town with real American values. Sure, this is a King novel, and some of this depiction is subverted, mainly via Jake's love interest, Sadie's mentally deranged husband, but all in all, Jake's experiences in Jodie are a pretty boring and formulaic way of showing how good living in little American town is. Maybe King was intentionally trying to display life in Jodie this way? Perhaps Jodie is intentionally meant to be like something out of the 1950s show "Leave It to Beaver"?By the way, I have just finished the watching the tv miniseries of the book and found that it was even worse than the book. I had thought that the novel might have worked better as tv series, especially since King went to great effort to try and accurately recapture some of the look and feel of 1960s America. The TV series deviates from the book in many places, more for the sake of trying to make the storytelling more formulaic for a potentially easily distracted audience, than for trying to take the novel's story in new and interesting places.If I ever find a pantry that takes me back to the 1960s and I run into Lee Harvey Oswald. my plan is to spend some time talking to him, sure, this may mess with the forces of time (King's novel suggests bad things happen when we try to change the past, hence, one must limit one's interaction with others from the past), but can talking to Oswald be any worse to the forces of time than the act of shooting the man?