11/22/63: A Novel by Stephen King

I just finished this book last night and read most of it in the last week. It centers around Jake, a schoolteacher in 2011, who finds out through a local diner owner, Al, that there is what is termed a "rabbit hole" in the back of his restaurant that takes people to 1958. Al is dying from lung cancer and has Jake go through the rabbit hole a couple of times to experience it before telling him his idea: Al wants Jake to go and live in the past and prevent JFK's assassination. Initially, Jake doesn't think he's up to it, but eventually agrees to Al's persuasion. Al gives Jake money, a fake ID (Jake becomes "George"), and a notebook he has written on Oswald and his movements in Dallas leading up to the assassination. Jake takes all of this information with him and tries to lead as normal of a life as possible in the past, but doesn't always quite blend in due to some catchphrases that don't exist yet, which makes some people suspicious. I think how King blended everything together worked well, but I will admit I was disappointed by the ending.

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

I read this book in pretty much 26 hours, from when I began to when I ended since it is very much similar to Walls' Glass Castles book. Unlike Glass Castles, which is Walls' memoir, Half Broke Horses is about Walls' grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, and her life living in west Texas and Arizona. Smith's life begins in west Texas, where her family is stuck taking what the weather will give them, in terms of flash flooding and drought, until their house is destroyed by a tornado. Then they move to Arizona onto a ranch they had been renting. There, Smith learns to break horses and has all sorts of adventures, such as going to boarding school and teaching 500 miles away from home when she was 15 years old. How did she get to her job? By riding solo on horseback for almost a month. She eventually moves to Chicago to experience life in the big city, where she meets her first husband, who, after six years of marriage, she discovers is a bigamist who had a wife with three children before marrying her. She leaves him and moves back to Arizona, trying to carve out a life for herself teaching. She has many adventures, such as learning to drive a car and fly a plane and even gets her bachelor's degree and teaching certificate when she was 40 years old. I definitely recommend this book if you want to get a real glimpse of living on a ranch in the early- to mid-1900s.

The Mercy Room by Gilles Rozier

The Mercy Room is about an unnamed and ungendered character during World War II in France. The main character's name is never said or revealed in any way, nor is their gender (but there are enough clues to make the character a woman, as they marry a man named Jude). What is the "mercy room" is initially a small room in a cellar meant for the character's storing of books. They go there to read and enjoy the quiet. While at work, the character meets and ends up smuggling in a Jew named Herman. The reader knows of the character's infatuation with Herman and is a main motivating reason why the character protects him. Herman stays in the mercy room, and the two together make him a mattress from repurposed materials. During this time of the character protecting, feeding, and educating (and learning from) Herman, he falls in love with her. After two years of hiding in the cellar, Herman becomes quite restless (also because of the body they must bury in the mercy room) so the character must help him escape out of the mercy room without being suspected of being a Jew. I'm not a big fan of history, particularly anything militaryish, but it was an interesting read to find out where the love story would end.