I'm a sports fan. Have been since I started watching baseball back growing up in the late 80s, and I think that sports fans are drawn to hypotheticals. What if the ball hadn't gone through Bill Buckner's legs in the 1986 World Series, leading to the Mets winning instead of the Red Sox? What if Michael Jordan hadn't decided to have trouble with the curve in the mid-90s- how many titles might he and the Bulls have won?
Time travel may seem silly to some, since it's physically impossible. But for those who can put that aside and go along for the ride and see where time-travel might lead, it's definitely a must-read.
11/22/63 is all about the hypotheticals. Jake Epping is a teacher in 2011, but has his world flip-turned upside down when Al Templeton, a man owning a diner comes to him with a discovery- inside his diner, there's a portal (and everytime I hear of a portal, I think of Super Mario 3 for some reason) that will transport someone back to September 9, 1958. Templeton persuades Jake to go back in time to prevent president John F. Kennedy's assassination). Jake decides to make a test run to see if he can prevent an adult-learning student's family from being murdered and the student from being injured. After this test run, he agrees to go back to 1958 and try to save JFK.
11/22/63 is a first-rate page turner. King's narration of both Jake Epping and alter ego George Amberson is riveting- it's observational (especially of differences between the two eras), witty, wry, and emotional. It's a very long book (around 850 pages), but the journey is extremely worthwhile, and King's depiction of the 1950s and 60s and all the locales makes a reader feel like they're part of the action, a co-conspirator with Epping/Amberson.
Time travel may seem silly to some, since it's physically impossible. But for those who can put that aside and go along for the ride and see where time-travel might lead, it's definitely a must-read.
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