11/22/63 by Stephen King

One of the things I enjoy about reading Stephen King is the connections.

King has created three fictional towns based in Maine that reappear regularly in his books - Derry, Jerusalem's Lot & Castle Rock.

Many of the characters from these towns also pop up in unexpected places.

Pennywise the Clown & Randall Flagg are two that cross our paths, one way or another in almost every story.

And it's not just the main characters - neighbours, pharmacists, librarians & even cars tease the Kingophile into trying to remember which books they came from first.

11/22/63 has oodles of these connections to tantalise and tease, beginning with the protagonists name Jake - a name that King uses a lot in his books.

Jake's second time-travelling experience takes him back to Derry 1958 - a few short months after the murderous summer of IT.
He briefly meets young Richie Tozier & Beverly dancing in the park. They allude to the events of the summer and tell Jake that they know he is one of the good guys.

The whole time Jake is in Derry he feels the negative effects of the bad undercurrent that infuses everyone & everything. A visit to the old Kitchener Ironworks leaves Jake with a sense that something evil is lurking in the fallen chimney...all IT readers know exactly what that lurking thing is!

When Jake finally moves on to Dallas, Texas, we leave many of the familiar King haunts only to arrive in a time and place that anyone born before 1970  is intimately familiar with.

King excels at the details. The language, the songs, the cars, the clothes, the books, the shops, the references are all of their time. A nostagla effect kicks in for the time-travelling sections of the story (which is most of it!)

The writing is not beautiful, but it is evocative and it is real. The darker, grittier side of real that is. Bodily functions, dark thoughts, gross behaviours, crude speech....

11/22/63 is a page turner, like the best Stephen King's of old. The battle between good and evil is far more subtle & complex than in some of his earlier books, which makes for a richer reading experience. I can now see why this has become one of Mr Books favourite King's.

There is the impossible, eerie coincidences, the despair of reality & the promise of hope. This one is not a gory horror story. 11/22/63 is more about the suspense.

Thank you to Wensend and Fourth Street Review for hosting King's March. It has been quite an intoxicating experience dropping back into the world of King. I won't stay away so long this time...promise!

It's Monday, Monday

What are you reading this week?

  

Join Sheila at Book Journeys to find out what the big, wide world of blogging is also reading this week.

I feel much lighter of heart now that my sad chunkster, Testament of Youth from the last month is finished & reviewed (below).

To say that I now need something more light-hearted is an understatement. And as luck would have it, the perfect book fell into my lap a couple of days ago.

Yes Please by Amy Poehler should do the trick!

In Amy Poehler’s highly anticipated first book, Yes Please, 

she offers up a big juicy stew of personal stories, funny bits on sex and love 

and friendship and parenthood and real life advice (some useful, some not so much), 

like when to be funny and when to be serious. 

Powered by Amy’s charming and hilarious, biting yet wise voice,  

Yes Please is a book is full of words to live by.

Thanks to last week's It's Monday meme I discovered that Wensen & Fourth Street Review are hosting a Stephen King reading month called King's March. It's still not too late to join if, like me, you have some King's lurking on your TBR pile.

Mr Books highly recommended 11/22/63 to me and given my predilection for time-slip stories & JFK, it seems like an obvious win-win book choice for me.

Life can turn on a dime—or stumble into the extraordinary, as it does for Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in a Maine town. 

While grading essays by his GED students, Jake reads a gruesome, enthralling piece penned by janitor Harry Dunning: fifty years ago, Harry somehow survived his father’s sledgehammer slaughter of his entire family. 

Jake is blown away . . . but an even more bizarre secret comes to light when Jake’s friend Al, owner of the local diner, enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination. How? By stepping through a portal in the diner’s storeroom, and into the era of Ike and Elvis, of big American cars, sock hops, and cigarette smoke. . . . 

Finding himself in warmhearted Jodie, Texas, Jake begins a new life. But all turns in the road lead to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald. The course of history is about to be rewritten . . . and become heart-stoppingly suspenseful.

The only problem I have with this book is the date.

In Australia we always write the date DD/MM/YY. 

Everytime I see this title my mind automatically says, "the 11th of ......what, we only have 12 months, not 22? what the? Is Stephen King messing with my head already? No! oh, it's American, so that means the month is first, so it reads November the 22nd, 1963! And means the same as 22nd November, 1963. Or 22/11/63 to be more Aussie. Got it now! Phew!"

And just in, a copy of Anatolia: Adventures in Turkish Cooking has found its lovely way into my home enticing me with gorgeous places to visit and yummy aromas. Based on the menu at one of my favourite local restaurants, Efendy, I can't wait to try some of them myself!

Anatolia is a richly illustrated, entertaining and informative exploration of the regional cooking culture of Turkey. Turkish-born chef Somer Sivrioglu and co-author David Dale re-imagine the traditions of Turkish cooking, presenting recipes ranging from the grand banquets of the Ottoman empire to the spicy snacks of Istanbul's street stalls. In doing so they explain their take on the classics and reveal the surrounding rituals, myths, jokes and folk wisdom of both the old and new Turkey.

More than 150 dishes are featured, and images of the recipes are complemented by specially commissioned photographs shot on location in Turkey. Feature spreads on local Turkish chefs and producers and their specialities add a fascinating layer of interest and flavour.

Somer Sivrioglu grew up in Instanbul and moved to Sydney when he was twenty-five. He now runs the extremely popular Efendy restaurant in Balmain, where he draws on a multitude of cultural influences to recreate the food traditions of his homeland.

David Dale is an Australian political journalist, commentator on popular culture, and food and travel writer. In his earlier books, David analysed how Italian cooking charmed the world. He's convinced that 'Turkish is going to be the next international phenomenon and Somer the next Ottolenghi'.

Happy Reading! 

King's March

I love a readalong.

And I love Stephen King.

Well, that's not quite true.

My relationship with Stephen King has been more turbulent than a simple bookish love affair.

And it all began with Mr Books.

Mr Books & I met during our Uni days many, many moons ago. I was just nineteen, he was twenty. And he loved Stephen King...so much so that he gave me It for our first Christmas!
I know, I know! Nothing says I love you forever like a scary clown, disappearing children and creepy drains!

Our first road trip holiday together saw me scaring myself silly with Pet Sematary while the future Mr Books, amused himself by practicing his Jack Nicholson Shining laugh when I least expected it!

During this happy, youthful time together, I devoured Cujo, Carrie, Fire Starter, Christine, Salem's Lot, The Talisman, The Eyes of the Dragon, Misery, Different Seasons, The Stand & The Gunslinger 1, 2 & 3.

But, sadly, inevitably, the seemingly never-to-be Mr Books & I parted company.

I tried to maintain my King-love, but The Tommyknockers, Dolores Claiborne & Dreamcatcher stretched the friendship to breaking point.

In 1994 The Stand mini-series came to my attention.
My profound disappointment with the appalling adaptation caused me to go back and reread a few of the early King's. My opinion at this point, was that King had lost his way. His best & genuinely scary book writing days were behind him and that with the exception of The Shining, it was impossible for the screen to do justice to his creeping horror.

Not long after, I discovered that King was still writing The Gunslinger series (as I continue to call it, though it has now been renamed The Dark Tower series.)

I wrote about my love affiar with this series last year here & I revised my opinion again. Yes, King could still write - as long as he stuck to the fantasy/horror genre that he did so well and stayed away from the alien/dream shit!

Then I watched The Shawshank Redemption & realised that his short stories especially, could be adapted successfully to the big screen.

And just like a big screen romance, Mr Books & I found each other & true love again!

During our time apart, he had also drifted away from King.

And so it was that this time around, I re-introduced Mr Books to Stephen King via The Gunslinger series.

Together we watched The Green Mile & The Shining. And in a fit of madness, we also decided to re-watch The Stand mini-series (this book sooooooo deserves a better screen version!)
We've read and watched Under the Dome together (although I gave up on the TV series long before Mr Books conceded defeat!)

Mr Books has now also read Duma Key, 11/22/63, Joyland & Mr Mercedes. Knowing how pressed I am for quality reading time, he insists that the only one I really need to read is 11/22/63.

Which is my very long-winded, round-about way of saying that, this month, during King's March, hosted by Wensend and Fourth Street Review, I will be reading 11/22/63.

Flashback Friday - The Gunslinger series

When I was a sweet young thing of 19, Mr Books first introduced me to Stephen King, by giving me It for Christmas (so romantic I know!)

But it was love at first sight on both accounts.
It was also a love that waxed and waned over the years on both accounts!

After nearly 15 years apart, Mr Books and I found each other again only to discover that our love for each other and SK had kept apace.
We had both lost faith with King during the 90's but we had also found our way back into the fold by the time we found each other again.

For me it was The Gunslinger series that brought me back.

I read the first two (The Gunslinger(1982) and The Drawing of the Three(1987) in the late 80's & The Wastelands(1991) a couple of years later.
I adored them. They were rough, they were cruel, they were dark and gritty, but they were also romantic and spell-binding.

Roland is the gunslinger - a mysterious man - who has been chasing an even more mysterious dark man through time and worlds for a very long time. He is joined by a young boy, Jake in his quest and later Eddie and Susannah join the ka-tet.
All are reluctant and unwitting participants in the quest. But as they go along a bond forms and the quest takes on different meanings for all of them (including me the reader).

King liked to use lots of references from his other novels through out these books. Sometimes it was characters or places that popped up and sometimes it was shared events & experiences. Shared or parallel worlds also occurred to keep the King devotee really on their toes!

My three books are some of the original covers which include gorgeous colour plates throughout.
They were reread several times with no hope of ever seeing the end of the quest. King kept publishing other books; I thought the Gunslinger had been forgotten by everyone but me.

Imagine my delight when I discovered a fourth book in my local bookshop in the year 2000! My only disappointment was the non-matching covers and the fact that Wizards and Glass (1997) didn't actually move the story of the quest forward. Instead , King spent an entire book on Roland's back story.

The next wait was not so long, and was well rewarded.
In a flurry of activity and purpose King published Wolves of Calla (2003), Song of Susannah (2004) and The Dark Tower (on his birthday 21 Sept 2004) within 12 months of each other.

The quest was over (or was it?), Stephen King made an appearance in his own book (yes, really!) and a companion book Through the Keyhole was released in 2012.

I have read since, that King revised the original Gunslinger in 2003. I'm not sure if I want to read the new version or not. I'm not sure I even have the stamina to reread the whole series again.

But I did love this fantasy world of quests and journeys.
It still lives fresh in my mind to this day.
Roland and Flagg are part of my mythology now; a shared experience with Mr Books (who shares a birth date with Mr King - really!)

When Mr Books and I combined libraries, our King shelf proudly declared that we two, were indeed, two of the devotee's.
Plenty more Flashback Friday's in that pile!