11/22/63 by Stephen King

★★★★★

"We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.  Not until the future eats the present, anyways.  We know when it's too late."

"For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all.  Don't we all secretly know this?  It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life.  Behind it?  Below it and around it?  Chaos, storms.  Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns.  Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand.  A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted state where mortals dance in defiance of the dark."

"You never knew me, but I love you, honey."

This book was amazing! I probably never would have picked it up if I hadn't been reading it from book club, but I'm so glad I did! 

Over the past two weeks I've been very obsessed with the book and when I'm really into a book I bring it every where with me. To work, to appointment, to my friend's houses...everywhere. So everyone kept asking me what I was reading. When I started raving about it and said it was Stephen King, I got a lot of the same responses: "Oh, Stephen King? He writes all those creepy horror novels. Those freak me out." I've only read the first three dark tower novels, so I can't judge, but this is NOT a horror book! Suspense-thriller, maybe. Mystery, yes. A novel about time travel, definitely. Historical fiction, absolutely. And a love story, yep it's got that too! And dancing. There's a lot of dancing.

The basic premise of the novel is a teacher named Jack Epping who travels through time to 1958 where he tries to stop the John F. Kennedy assassination. But changing the past is a lot hard then he thinks. And to top it off, he realizes that he really likes living in the late 1950s / early 1960s. And, of course, he falls in love.

I haven't read too much about this time period, or the assassination for that matter, so I really enjoyed King's perspective of this important time in America's past. I read a book review that I think sums it up quite nicely: "As a book, it is incredible. Once again King takes us back to the late 50's in a way no one else seems to be able to do. The stark difference between that time and ours is almost like reading a fairy tale or ancient history."

This book was #1 on my top ten list of 2013.