For my own twist on Throw Back Thursday (TBT) I’m going to post a book that I’ve previously read prior to starting this blog. For my first installment, here’s one of my favorites.

11/22/63

By Stephen King

Rating: 5/5 Stairs

While this is not a book I’ve read recently, it’s one I want to get onto Hidden Staircase. Whenever someone asks me for a book recommendation, this is always the first book that comes to mind.

Don’t shy away because it’s written by Stephen King. This is not a horror story. Far from it. 11/22/63 is just great storytelling. My brother loved it because he has always been interested in the Kennedy assassination, and the potential cover up there. (As am I.) I loved the premise – what if you found a wormhole in time, and you could use it to go back and change the past. Would you change the events? Could you? How would the future change for the better? What effect would it have on you?

11/22/63 starts out as a time travel book. But along the way it turns into something else. It’s a book about life. The life you chose to lead, the life you were meant to lead. Below comes from my original Goodreads book review.

Hardcover – Back Cover

I thought 11/22/63 had a simple premise – Jake Epping travels back in time to stop the assassination of President Kennedy. Wrong. This book is so much more than that. Jake goes down what is termed “the rabbit hole.” Every time he goes through, he ends up at 11:58 am on September 9th 1958. It doesn’t matter if he spends an hour or a year there, when he comes back through the rabbit hole to 2011, only two minutes have passed. In order to save JFK, Jake must spend five years in the past waiting. By 1960 Jake has begun living in the small town of Jodie, Texas, just outside Dallas. My favorite line in the book is when he states:

It was when I stopped living in the past and just started living.

Jake’s path and the life he finds make this book much more than a simple time travel experiment. He discovers that dancing is life.