Stephen King's book 11/22/63... is a brick! I am not really intimidated by large books... after all, one of the most heart-wrenching books I've read in the last decade was A Little Life, and it was longer than this one (which is 849 pages). But I was not quite as emotionally gripped, even though I did indeed get the story into my head and wanted to finish it. This was the November choice for my Music Hall book group, which met earlier this evening. It was an interesting gathering, veering off on subjects such as whether Stephen King might be bipolar (just because his creativity is so massive) or whether or not there was more than one shooter in the JFK assassination (among us was a man who participated in research in the early 80's at MIT commissioned by the FBI using state-of-the-art technology in sonar recordings, whose research makes it undeniable that there were at least 3 shooters and perhaps many many bullets that day...). Anyway, this is not the usual horror story by King but a time-travel complex novel. And yes, one of the questions is provokes is the famous butterfly effect made famous by Ray Bradbury's story, how one seemingly tiny event can trigger massive changes in the trajectory of future events. I think we got way too focused on that to the detriment of other threads holding this well-wrought story together. I think personally that it is a love story. Of people, yes, but also of life. Each of us makes decisions constantly throughout our lives, and at any juncture, would could have acted differently, and our stories would have been different, just as in history. So ultimately, what matters? This is a tale of strange events, of "harmonies" in the universe, of the obdurate past not wanting things to change, of the stubbornness of individuals wanting to do right but never really knowing for sure. It also has some beautiful statements on what is magical in spending much of your life with young people "teaching"... of seeing light in the hearts of the young and therefore (at least for me) knowing that each individual has value and potential to fall in love with whatever the universe has put in their path. So I've told you next to nothing about the various plots and subplots. Nevertheless, I think this is such a rich book which you might allow to nibble at your mind. One of the (minor?) characters says: "Never underestimate the American bourgeoisie's capacity to embrace fascism under the name of populism." Whoa now... And... "Dancing is life."

on the bench near the entrances