Finished: 11/22/63 (King). "The past is obdurate..." Awesome book about a high school English teacher in 2011 who travels back in time to try and stop the assassination of JFK! Jake Epping is shown a time traveling portal by his friend and diner owner, Al. Al is dying of cancer and needs to pass the secret on to someone he trusts to use it wisely. Going through the portal always takes Jake (and Al before him) to September of 1958. Al's goal had been to go back in time, live the necessary 5 years back "then" until 1963, and then stop the assassination of President Kennedy. He discovered his cancer, though, and realized he wouldn't live long enough to get the job done. Even though he spent a few years in the past, every time he comes back through the portal to 2011, it's only been 2 minutes in 2011 time. So...Al wants the younger, healthier Jake to go back and do the job himself. It's complicated, though, because he needs for Jake to be sure that Oswald acted alone and that it wasn't a conspiracy. In other words, it's more complicated than just going back in time, killing Oswald, and then stepping back into 2011. Jake has another mission on his mind to test out the theory of stopping a tragedy. Harry Denning, the janitor at his school, has written a night-school English essay about the horrific Halloween night of 1958 when his drunken father killed his mother and siblings right in front of his eyes with a sledgehammer. Jake means to go back and stop that from happening as a test to see if he can stop a major event. The book is so well written that it just keeps you turning pages. Of course, the book's catch phrase..."The past is obdurate"...becomes critical as the past itself becomes a character that tries to stop Jake at every turn from being successful in changing it. Jake manages to stop the murder of Harry's family, only to come back to 2011 and find out that, not only is Harry not the janitor at the high school...but he was killed in Vietnam at the age of 19. So....what impact did saving his family, but killing his drunken father have on Harry? Was Harry better off? The other kicker is that when Jake travels back through the portal to 1958 to live for five years and then prevent JFK's assassination, everything he did the first time he traveled back is reset. He's got to go and murder Harry's father all over again before he can set off for Texas. Jake and Al have discussed the ramifications of JFK not dying, and they think that one of them would be the non-escalation of the Vietnam War, and therefore, Jake hopes, the non-death of Harry in Vietnam...along with thousands of other lives saved. While living in a small town outside of Dallas in 1958 Jake falls in love with the librarian at his school, Sadie. Jake's relationship with Sadie complicates things...along with how close he grows to the seniors he teaches and the other teachers and administrators. On the sly, every so often Jake slips into a seedy apartment he's rented in Fort Worth and keeps tabs on the despicable Lee Oswald and his beautiful, abused wife and their baby daughter. To help fund his investigation, Jake also places a few bets with bookies on sporting events that he obviously knows the outcome of, and gets himself in trouble with some seedy characters. In the end, Jake does succeed in preventing Oswald from killing JFK, but loses Sadie to a bullet in the process. Though he's a hero, when he goes back to 2011, he goes back to a world that has completely changed and which has been marred by nuclear war. The major non-assassination change in history has had a huge "butterfly effect" and the world is no longer the same place he knew. It is many times worse worldwide than things were in 2011. Jake figures if he goes back through the portal one more time, he can reset all that by not saving JFK. It would also mean that Sadie would be alive in the past. Jake wants badly to just go and meet Sadie and not do any of the other heroic things so there won't be a huge affect, but he realizes that even that small change in history would have an affect somewhere. He goes back in time to write the book we are reading, and then he goes back to 2011, where things are back to normal. He uses the Internet to find out that Sadie is, in fact, still alive and is 80 years old living in the same small town. He is now 41 (because even though it's only been 6 minutes in 2011, Jake's body aged the amount of years he spent in the past). Jake packs his bags, heads to Texas, and approaches Sadie for a dance. She feels like she knows him from somewhere. He's just happy being with her even if she'll never remember their love. At over 800 pages, there is obviously alot of detail I"m leaving out...but what a great, great read...especially for those long travel days I just had! :-)