11/22/63

Read any good books lately? I'd kind of given up on Stephen King after the weird period where he was "retired" and doing crap like Cell and From A Buick 8, but he's still my second-favorite author of all-time and Under The Dome was supposed to be a renaissance of sorts for him. So on a whim I go 11/22/63 off iBooks and HOLY FUCK this might have been my favorite King book EVER. I absolutely tore through it like I did back in the good old days of reading "It" and "Tommyknockers" in high school instead of studying (although I noticed that my reading speed is much slower now than it was when I was 18…I wonder how fast teenaged Scott would have ripped through those books on an iPad?) It really marked the first time in a while I've sat down and devoured a book obsessively like I used to, maybe because it had such a tense, suspense-movie feel to it. The premise is cheesy 70s pulp stuff, with a portal to 1958 in a diner that leads a guy to think "Aha, what if I just stay there for 5 years and stop Oswald from killing Kennedy?" And then EVERYTHING GOES WRONG for him, because the past is a motherfucker. But it's such a wonderfully page-turning motherfucker. Like I was actually getting angry at the main character near the end of the book when something Very Bad happens to him and it's like "Fuck dude, just go back to that little town in Texas and stay out of the way of history like Picard said in First Contact." That's how you know you're getting personally invested in the characters. That was the main problem for me, as in WHY was this guy so set on saving JFK and not just living his life in idyllic small town 1960s like he seemed to want to do?

Anyway, it's an AWESOME book and now I've gotta plow through Under The Dome as well, I guess.