Roy Tang

11/22/63 by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was my first Stephen King book outside the Dark Tower series. Before reading the Dark Tower, I had pegged King as a writer of “scary” books because of his early works, and I wasn’t too interested. This book is none of that. It’s a nice, informative, well-written time travel story that wraps up nicely. I actually had no idea it was a time travel story when I started reading (you’d think the title would have given that away.)

When reading novels with a compelling plot, I tend to charge forward haphazardly, often skimming sentences and paragraphs to get to what happens next. For this one I often found myself slowing down to appreciate King’s prose. He’s quite good at writing compelling and descriptive sentences that aren’t just direct and simple “This happened, then he saw that.” etc. I suppose that comes from his prolific experience.

The book had a bit of a weaker middle part where I lingered around for a few months before finally deciding to finish it over the long weekend. I learned a lot about American history and geopolitics around the time of the Cuban missile crisis along the way too.

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