"11/22/63" by Stephen King — "Every time is the first time"

In May I wrote about a trip via car to and from Pittsburgh listening to the opening three or four hours of Audible Books' version of King's novel and being mesmerized by its spoken version.

Saturday I had occasion to continue listening during a 70-minute drive to and from Warrenton, Virginia, for the oddly-scheduled/named Firecracker 5K.

Maybe it's just time out of joint — who knows?

Anyway, again I was enchanted by the book's superb narrative, voiced by Craig Wasson, of a tale of travel back through time from 2011 to 1958, with wonderful excursions into things like parallel universes, the Butterfly Effect, Hugh Everett's Many-Worlds Hypothesis, and a concept of history as being set but not in stone, subject to manipulation and alteration but only with great difficulty.

In a nutshell — and I don't think this is spoiling the story for you should you choose to read or listen to it, since the cover has the same information — the protagonists repeatedly go back through a reusable portal to the same day and time in 1958, with the intention of altering the life of Lee Harvey Oswald such that he doesn't kill Kennedy.

But the thing about this book, as opposed to all the other time travel stories I've read in the sci-fi arena — and there have been many — is that it has King's wonderful gift for making characters seem real and three-dimensional, and thus believable.

A wonderful experience, listening to this novel, and I'm determined to keep enough of it in reserve (the unabridged reading lasts 30+ hours) so that I can listen for five hours each way on two upcoming long drives, to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in September and October, respectively.