Tag Archives: books

Stephen King, 11/22/63

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I don’t read much fiction, but when I saw that Stephen’s King newest novel was about a man who travels back in time to try and stop the assassination of JFK, I knew I had to read it. I’m a sucker for a good time-travel story, and I’ve long been interested in the JFK assassination, so this was right up my alley.

Well, it didn’t disappoint. Not only is it a thrilling read — it turns out to be a great love story, and very moving. It’s a long book — 850 pages — but I read it in a week, which is very fast for me. Whenever I had a free moment I just wanted to dive back into it. I started it last Saturday and finished it last night.

Time travel is my favorite sci-fi genre, because I love the theoretical implications. You really wouldn’t be able to go back in time without changing history. If you live in the past for any extended period of time, you’re going to have to eat and drink things, and buy stuff, and live somewhere. What if you buy something and that means, somewhere down the line, that the store runs out of stuff that some other person was originally supposed to buy? What if you rent a motel room and it turns out that someone else was originally supposed to rent it? What if your mere presence on a street has some micro-effect on the steps a man takes as he walks down that same street — either because he has to walk around you or merely notices you — and those micro-contortions cause the sperm inside him to jostle around slightly differently than they originally would have, so that when he impregnates his wife, a different sperm inseminates the egg, and an entirely different person is born?

You just never know.

11/22/63 doesn’t go quite that far. But at any rate, it’s terrific.

The only other Stephen King book I’d read before this was The Stand, a long time ago, and I only got about 1/3 of the way through it because it was too long. I’ve tended to dismiss him as a pop-fiction horror writer, but I really enjoyed this book, and I may have to read more of them now. Maybe I’ll work my way backward and read Under the Dome soon. (But right now I have a backlog of books to read. I still want to read the Steve Jobs biography.)

Also, it was refreshing to read a brand-new book. My reading interests are quirky, so most books I read are a few years old. It was nice to read a book that just came out.

Oh, and incidentally: the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination is November 22, 2013. JFK was assassinated on a Friday, and the 50th anniversary will also, somewhat creepily, be a Friday. And Friday is the day when movies are normally released. So maybe 11/22/13 would be a good release date for a movie adaption of this book. Just saying…

Watching TV

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Lately I’ve been nerding out with a terrific book: Watching TV: Six Decades of American Television, by Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik. It’s an incredibly detailed history of American television, organized season by season. The first three chapters cover the invention of TV and the beginnings of TV broadcasting, and after that, each TV season is covered in great, engagingly written detail, one chapter per season, from 1944-45 all the way up through 2009-10. (So far I’m up to 1978-79.) Most chapters are about 7-8 pages long, but the book is 8 1/2″ by 11″ and the text is in two columns per page, so on ordinary-sized book pages, each chapter would probably be about 20 pages long. (The chapters have neat titles, too. Here’s an explanation of each chapter title.)

The season-by-season structure lets you follow the story of TV over the years: the rise of the networks, the completion of the coaxial cable that allowed live TV from coast to coast, the move of TV production from New York to Hollywood. You can follow the flow of broadcasting trends over the years: TV experimentation in the 1940s, variety shows and anthologies and Westerns in the 1950s, action-adventure shows and rural escapist sitcoms in the 1960s, smartly-written CBS sitcoms in the early 1970s, and so on. You can follow the changing fortunes of the big networks: CBS was king for the first few decades of TV, but in the mid-70s ABC suddenly rocketed to number one with entertaining escapism like Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, and Charlie’s Angels. (That’s where I am right now.)

The book also covers government regulation of TV and the rise of public TV and cable TV, and it touches on national and world events when relevant. Did you ever wonder why network prime time runs from 8-11 pm (7-10 pm Central/Mountain), except for Sundays when there’s an extra hour? Did you ever wonder why TVs used to have both VHF and UHF dials? It’s in this book.

Each chapter also has a prime-time grid of the networks’ fall schedules for that season, as well as a sidebar listing some important events from the season.

This will sound silly, but I love this book. I’d always been a TV history nerd, but I didn’t know this book existed until a year ago. (It’s actually an updated edition; it was first published in 1982). I haven’t loved a book so much since The President’s House, a two-volume history of the White House, covered chronologically by presidency, that I read a few years ago. I guess I enjoy incredibly detailed, information-packed, well-written chronological narratives about topics I’m interested in.

Yeah, I’m a nerd, and proud of it.

Between Books

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Last week I finished reading a long book, and I’m trying to find a new one. So far, no luck.

I’ve got several dozen book samples on my Kindle, but none of them seems to be grabbing me. I keep switching back and forth between different books until my interest latches onto it. I guess that’s the nice thing about the Kindle, though: I can carry more than one book with me at a time.

I’m switching back and forth among Diarmaid McCulloch’s Christianity (a history book), Richard Evans’s The Third Reich in Power (I read the first book in his trilogy, The Coming of the Third Reich, a few years ago), and Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, also about Nazi Germany. But I’ve reached the end of the sample of that last one, and I can’t seem to get myself interested enough to pay for the whole book.

Why such depressing subject matter? I don’t know. I just find it interesting. But apparently not interesting enough to latch onto right now for a full read.

Maybe I need a break from reading the Kindle screen? Maybe I miss old-fashioned paper books?

I don’t know. I’m sure some book will call out to me soon enough.