11/22/63

I picked up 11/22/63 without any prior knowledge, except for what the date meant in American history. I went looking for the first installment of the A Song of Ice and Fire series, but ended up grabbing this out of instinct instead, since Game of Thrones was out of stock. On the way home, I studied the back cover. I thought to myself, "Great. A Stephen King novel. I'm sure half of the book will be about saving JFK, and the other half will be what it would be like to live in a world where JFK had lived. What would have changed? Would the race wars end? So many possibilities.", and I couldn't have been more wrong.

It's not until 800 pages in (out of 849 total) that you actually get an idea of what 2011 would be like had President John F. Kennedy actually lived. Instead of offering a post-apocalyptic story like I had come to expect, Stephen King offers a romantic and pessimistic story, of what it's like to live in the past, knowing what the future holds and h...