While I end up liking most of the books
that I read by Stephen King, he isn't an author that I salivate over when
something new comes out. I'm not sure why, as I like the genre and the
style of writing. Perhaps I'll chalk it up to having too many other things
to read. :) Anyway, 11/22/63:
A Novel caught my interest in
terms of what it might be like to go back and prevent an event in history
that changed the world. Once I started reading, I was pretty much hooked.
King put a slant on the typical time travel story that threw my expectations
out the window and had me thinking about the "what if" moments
of life...
The story revolves around Jake Epping,
an ordinary teacher with an ordinary life... that is, until Al, the owner
of the local diner, shows him something unexplainable. In the pantry, there
is a "hole" that leads back to September 9th, 1958. It's
the same location at the same time with the same people every time they
go through the passage. Furthermore, the exact same actions and events
start happening when they arrive, and nobody there remembers that Jake
or Al were ever there. If you think of the movie "Groundhog Day",
you get the idea. Regardless of how much time Jake or Al spend in
the past, only two minutes elapse in current time. Stay in the past
for a year, come back, and it's only two minutes later. Jake and
Al have aged that one year, but nothing else has.
Al shows all this to Jake for a reason...
Al is dying of cancer, and he has a plan in mind. He wants Jake to cross
back over to 1958 and live the next five years with a single purpose: to
prevent Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating John F. Kennedy. He believes
that many of the problems of today can be traced back to that pivotal event,
and he wants to change history at that point in time. He leaves Jake a
detailed notebook on Oswald's life and movements up to the point of the
shooting, and Jake needs to make sure he doesn't do anything in that five
year period to alter Oswald's life and erase the point in time where he
can stop Kennedy's death. But as Jake finds out, "the past is
obdurate", and it will work at making sure that history plays out
as intended with no interference. And the bigger the historical change,
the harder the past will work at preventing it.
Normally, a time travel story seems
to play out along the same lines. Person goes back in time, inadvertently
does something to affect the future, and/or meets him/herself along the
way. You could argue that the basics of 11/22/63 are the same, in
that a person is going back in time to change or prevent something. But
the stakes are higher here, in that Jake has to decide whether or not to
spend the next five years of his life pursuing something that may or may
not happen if he makes mistakes along the way. He also has to right some
wrongs and figure out how best to prevent certain people from acting. He
could kill them early, but that might put him in jail with no way to return
to the portal to get back to 2011. Or what if the conspiracy theories were
true, and Oswald was set-up to take the fall? Killing Oswald wouldn't prevent
Kennedy's death. What I found even more mind-bending was what happened
when he tried to prevent an accident that put someone in a wheelchair back
in 1958. He prevented a stray bullet from paralyzing a woman, and returned
to 2011 to find that she had lived a very successful life as a fully-functional
adult. But once he went back through the portal, everything from 1958 forward
reset, and she was again in a wheelchair in 2011. Even though the person
has no knowledge of how history changed for them, does that still make
Jake responsible for returning her to a life of paralysis again? And
finally, can you be sure that regardless of how bad things may seem right
now, changing a major event in history will really make things better 50
years later?
King pulled off a great novel in 11/22/63.
While I thought it was perhaps a bit slow at times when he was shadowing
Oswald in the 18 or so months leading up to the assassination, the mental
and moral quandaries more than made up for it. I really need to rethink
my slowness in reading new King novels, as I'd be a happy reader if I always
had material like this to read during my down times.
Book Review - Stay Close by Harlan Coben
Sun, May 20th 2012 3:00p Thomas Duff I recently finished the latest book
from Harlan Coben titled Stay
Close. My favorite books
by Coben are the ones in the Myron Bolitar series, but the stand-alone
titles aren't too bad either. Stay Close is in the stand-alone category,
and I thought it was an enjoyable read. If I were headed on vacation
for a week or so, packing this book as reading material would have been
worth the weight...
The general story revolves around three
individuals who are all trying to figure out wh [read] Keywords:
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User group meetings... the technology may be different, but the feeling is the same...
Sat, May 19th 2012 8:30p Thomas Duff Today I attended my first SharePoint Saturday
event here in Portland. For those who don't know, SharePoint Saturday
is a concept started a few years back where a group of committed people
in the SharePoint community decided to hold a one-day user group meeting
on a Saturday, complete with multiple sessions and various vendors, all
at no cost to the attendees. This idea has spread world-wide, all
community-led and vendor-sponsored, targeted to share information among
professionals and/o [read] Keywords: domino
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Book Review - Squeezed: Rear-Ended by American Politics by J. C. Bourque
Sun, May 6th 2012 8:26p Thomas Duff I generally steer clear of political
books... mostly because I'm fed up with *both* sides. Political humor
is still OK, however. And if both sides are being skewered, so much
the better. I was asked if I was interested in reading and reviewing
Squeezed:
Rear-Ended by American Politics
by J. C. Bourque, and the premise was enough to get me hooked. And
the premise is? Ultra-conservatives and ultra-liberals are both the
same, in that they are convinced that they have all the answers, [read] Keywords: network
174
Book Review - The Developer's Code - What Real Programmers Do by Ka Wai Cheung
Sun, May 6th 2012 3:20p Thomas Duff I like books that gather a number of
essays and thoughts about technology (in this case, software development)
and bundle them in a single volume so I can contemplate what it is I do
as a profession. The
Developer's Code - What Real Programmers Do
by Ka Wai Cheung (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf) fits that description
perfectly. I've often said that one or two gems from a book like
this can make it an excellent buy. For me, this one met and surpassed
that criteria.
None of th [read] Keywords: application
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Book Review - Illusion by Frank Peretti
Sun, May 6th 2012 10:50a Thomas Duff Frank Peretti is an interesting author
who writes in a genre not overly populated... Christian supernatural thrillers.
Yeah, it's an odd combination, but Peretti makes it work, and very
well at that. Illusion
is his latest novel, and I forgot
how much I like getting lost in his books. Illusion mixes magic and
hi-tech science fiction with a touch of romance for a story that left me
wondering how everything was going to play out.
The basic story line... Dane and Mandy
Collins were [read] Keywords:
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Book Review - You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) by Jeff Goins
Sat, Apr 28th 2012 5:30p Thomas Duff It used to be that to become a writer,
you had to hope that you could convince the gatekeepers to let you pass.
Publishers held all the cards, and your only option was to play the game
their way (or not play at all).
Those days are gone...
Jeff Goins is a great example of someone
who has figured out the new rules and freedoms that exist when it comes
to being a writer. He shares his insights as well as dishing out
plenty of encouragement in his new e-book You
Are a Writer (So [read] Keywords: connections
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Book Review - V is for Vengeance by Sue Grafton
Sun, Apr 22nd 2012 4:11p Thomas Duff Seems like forever since Sue Grafton
published an installment in her alphabet series with Kinsey Millhone. That
wait ended when I picked up V
is for Vengeance from the library.
Actually, the gap between this and U is for Undertow was good, as
I was getting a bit burned out on Millhone. The stories weren't having
the same appeal as earlier efforts, and reading them seemed like more of
an effort to keep up instead of a pleasure. V revives some of that
pleasure once again, and this was [read] Keywords:
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Book Review - Presumed Guilty by Tess Gerritsen
Sun, Apr 22nd 2012 1:30p Thomas Duff Going back to catch an early novel in
a writer's career is always a gamble. What you expect from them now
isn't what you'll end up reading (in all likelihood). I saw that
Tess Gerritsen had a "new" novel that showed up at the library.
I picked up Presumed
Guilty expecting vintage Gerritsen,
but I got a bit of a surprise. This is actually a novel that was
written back in 1993 and published as a mass market paperback at that time.
It's now being re-released in hardback. In effe [read] Keywords: community
Book Review - Shock Wave by John Sandford
Sat, Apr 14th 2012 9:19p Thomas Duff While I've grown a little cold on the
John Sandford novels that feature Lucas Davenport, I'm finding I like the
Virgil Flowers novels a lot. Shock
Wave has Flowers tracking down
a serial bomber intent on stopping a large Walmart-like store from setting
up shop in a small town. Flowers is a nice mix of irreverence, vulnerability,
and persistence, all wrapped together in a mind that never stops running.
Sandford does a good job in capturing
the small town atmosphere where the ac [read] Keywords:
