I’m a bookworm. Always have been, always will be. Exactly three months ago I told a friend, who doesn’t read this blog, that I needed a new book to read. He replied:

11/22/63, it’s Stephen King, but it’s not horror. A guy travels back in time to stop the JFK assassination, it’s really good, a page turner.

I was intrigued. This is a friend I trust and as someone who usually reads non-fiction, I was willing to give this a try. I found it on my Kindle, and $11.99 later, the book was mine.

I opened the book on my kindle and it showed` 866 PAGES. This must be a mistake. There must be a flip book of the Zapruder film for the last 500 pages, because there’s no way he would recommend a something that’s this long.

But alas! No flip book. It was legitimately 850 pages before the epilogue. Simply put, that HAS to be the first thing you mention if you’re recommending this book. If I’ d seen the physical book, I almost certainly wouldn’t have bought it.

As for the book itself, I imagine no one cares unless you’ve read it, but I read the whole fucking thing, so I’m going to briefly say why it was a bad book, which is a bummer because it took me three months to read.

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THE GOOD

The first 100 pages and the last 100 pages were good. The premise was super intriguing, that you always travel back to the same time in 1958 when you step through the rabbit hole, that only 2 minutes pass in 2011 whenever you come out of the rabbit hole, that you can ‘reset’ by going back in and out. Great set up, I was all in.

The questions asked by Jake and Al in the first 100 pages, about eating the same meat, how much impact small changes make, etc. were super interesting; I mean that’s the entire draw of a time travel book. The whole thing with the green card man, then becoming the orange card, and eventually dying, this is what I wanted to read about!!!

Him finally stopping the assassination then traveling back to 2011 was the obvious payoff. There’s a lot of pressure there, as King could write anything about how the future would turn out if JFK had survived, but it was exciting to read that even if I found it underwhelming.

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THE BAD

The middle 650 pages were just a drag. Perhaps this was King flexing his writing chops or something, but I found it to be mostly boring. Killing Frank Dunning was mildly interesting, but you can’t spend 100 pages setting it up, following him around, etc. only for that to be totally irrelevant to the overall story.

The build up of Lee Harvey Oswald was also just so long. Hundreds of pages of him interacting with his wife, the baby, etc. It was so repetitive and uninteresting.

Then there’s Sadie. Instead of a time-travel sci-fi thriller, this book was mostly a meh love story. Sadie was fine. King also made Jake not-that-likeable. The amount of times he talked about banging Sadie like he was the man, or the kids queuing songs at the dance specifically for them. Once or twice, whatever, but it was constant. And the harmonies just felt stupid by the end. It all made me not like Jake.

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OVERALL

This could have been a 350 page book that explored saving JFK and altering the future with the rabbit hole countless times, but instead, it was an extremely long love story that probably took King forever to research and write.

Don’t get me wrong, it was readable, it wasn’t the worst book I’ve read, but the payoff for that length was not nearly worth it.