11/22/63

11/22/63 is a time travel novel by Stephen King. I did not like the book, but could not give King a one-star rating (I did not like it), so gave the book two-stars (it was okay). I kept thinking: If Walter Mosley had written this book it would have been 1/2 as long and twice as good.

A glitch allows travel from 2011 to September 9, 1958. No matter how long a time traveler stays in 1958, when he returns to 2011, only two minutes have passed.  Can not say much without spoiling the story for any who might read this post and read the book. Will just say that Jake is going to spend some time in the past in order to prevent Oswald from assassinating JFK. The moral of the tale could be that if we change the past, we change the future.

Author, Richard Bach taught me how that could be done with his novel, Illusions; The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. It is all about changing our perceptions about the past; the historical facts stay the same, but the way we view the events can positively impact our now (or future). Kind did that a lot in the first chapters of his novel (adding parentheses). I vowed I would never do it again as it got downright annoying. I even re-wrote some of the sentences in my head as I read ~ did not need them, Master King.

Why I did not like the book: too darn long. Perhaps if it was a snow bound Pocono Mountain winter when Internet did not yet exist, I may have liked the book as much as I liked King's earlier novels. Yet it seemed 11/22/63 was a series or interconnected short stories and I was mainly interested in how Jake would prevent Oswald's assassination or would he fail to do so.

I enjoyed the 2011 part of the tale and was also impatient for Jake to leave the past, return to the present and see how time travel affected his life. Instead I had to wade through dances, movies, boxing matches, what songs were playing on the radio and so on. Bored. Okay, I get it: details to give authentic feel for the time. Or for those who are nostalgic for a simpler place and time. I guess there had to be something happening to while away 5 years, yet too much for me.

I wrote a bit about 11/22/63 on my Homeless in Long Beach blog. These quotes may have belong there:

"...the way Mohreschildt listened. He did it as the world's more charming and magnetic people do, always asking the right question at the right time, never fidgeting or taking his eyes from the speaker's face, making the other guy feel like the most knowledgeable, brilliant, and intellectually savvy person on the planet."

"..giving myself the old advice, don't look back, never look back."  That may/may not be a coincidence, because whenever someone posts one of those cutesy things at Facebook about forgetting the past, I compose words in my head that I force myself not to type into the comment box. King says people seldom heed the advice. "Humans were built to look back; that's why we have that swivel joint in our necks."

Just prior to reading that I was again thinking about forgetting the past. "God put our eyeballs in front of our heads, so we would look forward, not look back," the arsejet told me. At the time I thought it insightful. I also thought it stupid: if our eyes were in the back of our heads, then our backs would be our front, else how could we see where we were going? Ah, if I could travel back in time and tell him about 'God' giving us swivel necks so we could look back ~ over our shoulders.

Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it, versus, Never let yesterday use up today.

An old, old argument floated back to mind while I was contemplating the "forget the past, there is no future in it" type Facebook copy/pastes. "You're living in the past," my ex used to shout at me. Well, no, I was living in the present moment, talking about the past. The unforgettable time he did thus and such and the result was bad. Of course, he would not listen to reason, and try it my way this time and one more time: bad results.

I do not see how it possible for anyone but a time traveler to actually live in the past. A person may retain habits, such as my mother's refusal to get a push button telephone, hanging on to the black rotary dial phone rather than change with the times. Yet she was not living in the old days; she was right there, right then.

Keep on walking, don't look back, lyrics often float into my brain. I thought it good advice and probably used the song to keep me moving forward, coming to terms with heart ache and sorrow, not wallowing in it. Yet do not see reading about this in the novel as much of a coincidence.