Taking It Easy

When I started reading Stephen King's 11.22.63 just ahead of the vacation week I was half-wondering whether I'd go all out to complete the novel by the end of the vacation. It's 700+ pages, so it was a certainly a candidate for completion, but substantial enough to keep going for a bit longer, especially if I cracked on with other reading. In the event, I decided  very early in my reading not to press on deliberately. It was quickly apparent that King wasn't aiming for the urgency of pacing of novels like The Outsider and The Institute (both recent reads for me.) So, not a page-turner in that sense. Also I found the exposition a touch draggy, though necessarily so. After all, King isn't the kind of writer who's likely to skimp on the 'rules' he'll abide by in a tale of travel through time and it was obvious that the set-up was fundamental to determining all sorts of plot details to come.

It was also obvious that the main plot concerning Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of JFK was not necessarily going to emerge in its full flowering until important preliminaries concerning some key secondary characters had been dealt with. In fact, I've only just reached the point at which the protagonist encounters his 'first' Oswalds (the brother and mother) and I'm around 300 pages in. Indeed, the novel has a digressive quality I don't think I've come across in any other work by King. For example, there's a lovely wholly idyllic episode occupying the entirety of Chapter 11 set in the Maine lakes in which the protagonist enjoys the happiest five weeks of his life that's quite different in tone from anything that has come before.

I should add that apart from the peculiar qualities of the text my vacation week has not proved quite as relaxed as I thought it might. Various aspects of work have managed to intrude on my time and an intense reading of any text was never going to be easy. So, I've decided to spin out my reading of the novel and make it as deliberately leisurely as possible, especially since the next few weeks look pretty intense work-wise and I'm intending to focus on Islamic-themed reading in Ramadhan (coming very soon.)

Must say, I'm looking forward to gently spinning out an already intriguing read.