Hayden Gilbert’s Reviews > 11/22/63 > Status Update

When I first read this book years ago, this is the moment where I knew I didn’t just love this story, but I was gripped like nothing else. This is the part of the story where you start to wonder whether Time, not wanting to be changed, could use love against you as sort of a sick weapon. This is the part of the book where you’re screaming “Forget JFK and marry the girl!”

“Goddamned Rolling Stones...”

“JIMLA!”

Enter Sadie Dunhill 🩷💚

“I shipped my paddle and just sat there three hundred yards out from shore, watching the moon and listening to the loons converse. I remember thinking if there was a heaven somewhere and it wasn’t like this, then I didn’t want to go.”
This passage made me fall in love with this book when I first read it. The time-travel thriller stuff is great, but the moments living in the past are what stay with me

.“I went half a block, then turned around, thinking they would be staring at me. But they weren’t. They were still dancing. And that was good.”

“That was a good feeling to go on, so I walked away from them, giving myself the old advice as I went: don’t look back, never look back. How often do people tell themselves that after an experience that is exceptionally good (or exceptionally bad)? Often, I suppose. And the advice usually goes unheeded. Humans were built to look back; that’s why we have that swivel joint in our necks.”

“I felt good…Until I saw Derry.”

“It wasnt a day but a night. The night that change my life was the night my father murdirt my mother and two brothers and hurt me bad.”

Put this re-read on pause at the beginning of summer so I could get to a few books I’d been meaning to read forever. Decided “**** it” and downloaded the audiobook, and Craig Wasson is a fantastic narrator.
Holy crap this book can make me cry like nothing else

“‘…but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?’
He stared at me, baffled. ‘Why the fuck would you do that?’
That was a good point, so I just told him to go on.”

“I have never been what you’d call a crying man.”

Rereading my favorite book.
About 10 years ago I picked this bad boy up. It was a beautiful escape for me during a time of intense period aimlessness and depression. It almost single-handedly got me back into reading, and inspired me to start writing seriously.
Can Jake Epping and Sadie Dunhill save me again? Only time will tell…