A review and summary of 11/22/63

WARNING: SPOILERS
I have just finished the book 11/22/63 by Stephen King.  I enjoyed the book very much, it kept me intrigued and I wanted to keep reading.  I would only give it 8.5 out 10 because for about the second quarter of the book, I was getting bored.  Nothing happened for that quarter of the book and I did not always want to read it.  The book got better though and I was interested again, so most of the book was good.  This is why I gave the book an 8.5/10.
In the book, Jake Epping is a teacher in Maine in 2011.  His friend Al, who owns a diner calls Jake and tells him to come to the diner one night. When Jake sees Al, Al is dying of cancer, which is strange because a day before, Jake saw Al and he was completely healthy.  Al shows Jake a portal to the past that he found in his diner.  He explains that the portal takes him to 1958, and no matter how long he is gone in the past, when he comes back, it has been two minutes in the present.  Also, every trip to the past resets in 1958.  Al tells Jake that he was in the past for 5 years, trying to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing John F. Kennedy, but his cancer prevented him from finishing the job.  He wants Jake to go back to the past for five years and stop Lee Harvey Oswald.  Because Jake is recently divorced and he doesn't see many good things for himself in the future, he accepts.  There is another thing Jake must do before saving the president.  He taught adult high school lessons over the summer for people who never graduated, and he teaches a man named Harry Dunning.  Harry was beaten with a sledgehammer as a child in 1958 by his father and barely survived while the other members of his family were killed.  Jake needs to know that what he does in the past can have an impact on the future, so he goes to the past to stop Harry's dad from killing his family and damaging Harry's brain.  He goes through a journey to stop Harry's father, and eventually shows up at the house on the night Harry's dad killed his family and saved all but one of the Dunning family besides the father.  Jake comes back to the present and tells Al what happened.  He sees that the picture of himself and Harry is no longer in his house, so he had succeeded in changing the past.  Al only remembers who Harry Dunning his because he was so close to the portal.  Jake says he will get some sleep and talk to Al in the morning before leaving for five years.  Jake goes to Al's house in the morning and finds that Al committed suicide.  Jake goes back to the past, stops Harry's father, this time from killing anyone, and goes to live in Florida.  In 1960, Jake moves to Texas and begins to plan to investigate Lee Harvey Oswald once he moves back to the United States from Russia.  Jake moves into a town south of Dallas called Jodie.  He lives there until the assassination and gets along well with the people who live there.  Jake falls in love with a woman in Jodie named Sadie.  George and Sadie spend a lot of time together and they decide to get married.  Jake even tells Sadie where he is really from and what he intends to do and Sadie believes him.  Jake is badly beaten soon before the assassination and he forgets a lot about what he has to do, but Sadie helps him remember it over time.  He doesn't want to involve Sadie anymore in his plans so that she doesn't get hurt, so he hides from her in Ft. Worth two days before the assassination.  Sadie finds Jake though, and she says he is to weak in his current state to do what he intended to do alone, so she comes with him.  The reach the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository just in time to stop Lee Oswald from killing the president, but Lee shoots and kills Sadie.  Lee is then shot by security from the street who heard a gun go off and saw him in the window with a rifle.  Jake returns to Maine and hears that there was a massive earthquake in Los Angeles that killed 7,000.  This didn't happen in his time.  He returns to the present and discovers the world to be much worse than it was before he saved John F. Kennedy.  This is not because John F. Kennedy turned out to be a bad president, but because the past is not supposed to be changed.  Earthquakes happened all over the world that had plummeted into nuclear war.  Scientists say that the world will be destroyed by the year 2080.  Jake knows what he has to do, so he goes back to 1958 to reset the past and then returns to 2011.  Everything was now just the same as it was before, and Jake continues his life in 2011, five years older than he was 2 minutes before.

Post #3: Book 1 Project

An idea for a fan experience to promote 11/22/63 by Stephen King is an 11/22/63 theme park.  There could be different areas in the park based on the different places Jake lived in in the past.  The different areas of the park could be Derry, Jodie, Fort Worth and Dallas.  The park could include thrill rides as well as restaurants based on diners from the late 50’s and early 60’s.  The thrill rides could be based on the events in the book, such as when Jake tried to stop Frank Dunning from killing his family.  During September and October, there could be haunted attractions.  An example this could be Sadie’s house when John Clayton broke into it and tore it apart before slashing her face and holding her hostage.  This part of the book is very creepy and it would be a good thing to use to scare people.  There could be pillars around the park that have actual information about the Kennedy assassination on them.

This idea came from many different parts in the book.  The idea for the restaurants comes from the many different restaurants Jake visits in the past and the descriptions of those restaurants and the food served there are included in the book.  An example of this is when Jake has a root beer at Kennebec Fruit Co. in 1958 in Maine and says, “He filled it from a tap and I could smell the root beer, rich and strong.  He scraped the foam off the top with the handle of a wooden spoon, then filled it all the way to the top and set it down on the counter.”  The idea for a haunted attraction came because the book is very disturbing at parts and adding haunted attractions could increase the amount of people interested in coming to the park.  An example of how the book can be creepy is when Jake says, “There, written in her own lipstick, were two words in letters three feet high: DIRTY ****.”  The idea for the pillars with actual facts and information about the assassination came because there are many is a lot of actual information about the assassination in the book.  Before Jake goes into the past, his friend Al tells him a lot of facts about the assassination and about Lee Harvey Oswald that are interesting and those facts as well as other facts should be included in the park.  Also, in the book, Jake encounters many people who were actually involved in the events leading up to the assassination, such as George de Mohrenschildt, who was a good friend of Lee Oswald.  At the point in the book when Al is giving Jake his mission, he says, “…somebody tried to kill General Edwin Walker… same rifle, ballistics proved it.”

This idea could greatly increase the audience for this book.  People could hear about the theme park and want to read the book before going.  They could also go and become very interested in the JFK assassination by learning facts about it.  This could lead to them wanting to read the book to get a different perspective on the assassination.  People who are already fans of the book would definitely want to come to the park to go through some of Jake’s experiences.  This would add more fun to the experience of the book and it would encourage fans to continue reading books by Stephen King.  Also, a lot of people would think the book is really cool because it has its own theme park.

This is an example of a diner one might eat at while at the theme park:

Post 2: What is a book?

A book is a written piece of text that can be entertaining, persuasive or informational.  A good entertaining book is an escape from the real world into your imagination.  Good books don't just tell you a story, they paint a picture in your mind.  Not all books are very good, but they are still books.  The content of books doesn't matter.  A book can be on paper or on electronics, it doesn't matter.  A book is still a book even if it is on a Kindle or iPhone.  Sure, I like to hold the physical paper book, but e-books are way more convenient.  I can have 200 books on my kindle that doesn't take up very much space, but 200 paper books take up a lot of space.  Also, it would be much easier to take a kindle to school with an 850 page book on it than take the actual book which doesn't even fit in my backpack.  Also, the length of a book doesn't matter.  A 20 page picture book is a book, and so is a 500 page novel.  Non-fiction books give information about science, history or anything else and they are books just like fiction books.

The best thing about my book is...

I am currently reading the book 11/22/63 by Stephen King.  The book is about a man who goes back in time to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  Jake has to live in the past for a long time because the only time he can travel to is in 1958, so he has to wait 5 years before he can gain all the evidence he needs to stop Lee Harvey Oswald and anyone else who might have been involved in the assassination.  The best thing about this book is it is very suspenseful.  There are so many conflicts that interrupt the main character, Jake, from his main goal of stopping Lee Harvey Oswald.  For example, Jake has a girlfriend in the past and on a day when he was supposed to witness Oswald's attempt to murder General Edwin Walker in order to see if anyone was with him, he got a call from his girlfriends crazy ex-husband who had broken into her house and was threatening to kill her if Jake did not come to her house.  This interrupted Jake in his investigation of Lee Oswald and it made him miss important evidence, drawing nearer to the day Kennedy would be assassinated.  Events like this in the book make me want to keep turning the page to see what happens next.