January 23, 2012

  • Time Travel

    I was sitting in the teacher's lounge at my alma mater when a nice young kid (20 years old?) sat down next to me and when I looked up at him he gestured at my Kindle.

    "Reading anything good?" he asked.

    "I'm reading the Stephen King book about the Kennedy assassination," I said.

    "Non-fiction, then?" he said good naturedly.

    I searched his face for irony and found none. He just didn't know who Stephen King is.

    I was already feeling the space/time continuum weight due to the old school/teacher's lounge/novel about time travel/reading a favorite author of my teenaged years. Oof.

    11/22/63 is Stephen King's fictional account of the Kennedy assassination. If you could go back in time and stop the assassination, would you? And what would the effect be? I really liked the book. I have always been a Stephen King fan and there were some parts of this that reminded me why. Some of it is not so good, of course, but it was a fun read and raised some interesting ideas. I am a little obsessed with what it would be like to be Lee Harvey Oswald's daughters, for example.

Comments (7)

  • Third time I've tried to comment on this post this morning. He does not know Stephen King? Wow. Throw a copy of The Stand at him and watch him convert (assuming he's a reader).

  • Yay! It worked that time! I'm back!

  • in fairness, king has done a little non-fiction. but if the child really DOESN'T know who he is, then yeah, clock him with The Stand, and when he comes to, upside him with It.

  • Remember the "Red Dwarf" episode about the Kennedy assassination? The space crew actually tried to go back and stop it.

  • Maybe he just thinks King wrote a nonfiction book about the Kennedy assassination? Or that he didn't quite hear you say King's name and just heard "Kennedy"?

    My brain is returning Does Not Compute when presented with a) 20-year-old who b) belongs in a teacher's lounge for some reason but still c) has never heard of Stephen King. My sixth-graders have all heard of Stephen King. There's got to be some other explanation.

  • Hell, my sixth-graders would know who King was before they recognized *Kennedy.*

  • I've had someone else mention that was a good book, but all I knew was the title and author. Didn't clue in until you blogged. I'll definitely need to add that to my kindle reading. Just finished a great book called The Weasel which is a true account of a notorious Canadian mobster snitch. Very interesting! :)

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