I read 11/22/63 in its hardback stages for my sorority book club. I remember it being long, and interesting, and at points terribly unsatisfying. My notes were also, at points, terribly unsatisfying and I have no idea what all I was trying to track. I can, however, categorize my legible notes.
Writing
What made the job hard was that the red pen became my
primary teaching tool instead of my mouth, and I practically wore it out. What
made the job dispiriting was that you knew that very little of that red-pen
teaching was apt to stick; if you reach the age of twenty-five or thirty
without knowing how to spell correctly, or capitalize in the proper places, or
write a sentence containing both a noun and a verb, you’re probably never going
to know. P. 3
He had written in cheap ballpoint ink that had blotted the
five pages in many places. His handwriting was a looping but legible scrawl,
and he must have been bearing down hard, because the words were actually
engraved into the cheap notebook pages; if I’d closed my eyes and run my
fingertips over the backs of those torn-out sheets, it would have been like
reading Braille. There was a little squiggle, like a flourish, at the end of
every lower-case y. I remember that was particular clarity. 4
I stroked a big red A on top of his paper. Looked at it for
a moment or two, then added a big red +. Because it was good, and because his
pain had evoked an emotional reaction in me, his reader. And isn’t that what A+
writing is supposed to do? Evoke a response?5
Random Spot-On Musings
I guess we always find excuses to keep on with our bad habits,
don’t we? 18
Here is one of the great truths of the human condition: when
you need Stayfree Maxi Pads to absorb the expectorants produced by your
insulted body, you are in serious fucking trouble. 54
And really, there’s no downside. If things turn to shit, you
just take it all back. Easy as erasing a dirty word off a chalkboard. 62
On that gray street, with
the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to
evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker
in a church pew. 125
This town isn’t as bad as it was—last July, folks were
strung as tight as Doris Day’s chastity belt—but it’s still a long way form
right. 131
I remembered a sociology prof I’d had in college—a sarcastic
old bastard—who used to say, When all else fails, up and go to the library. 133
Frame him for something? It might work in a spy novel, but I
wasn’t a CIA agent; I was a goddam English teacher. 159
…but the past is obdurate.
It doesn’t want to change. 182
On the subject of love at first sight, I’m with the Beatles:
I believe that it happens all the time. … So I guess I’m also with Mickey and
Sylvia, who said love is strange. 336
I undressed and went to bed, where I lay awake a long time,
thinking long thoughts. About time and love and death. 375
Her nipples made tiny shadows, like punctuation marks,
against the cloth in the late light. 382
James Bond might’ve been up for a third go-round, but
Jake/George was tapped out. 383
But we got it, poundcake became our name for it, and we ate
plenty that fall. 386
He had all his books alphabetized, and he got very upset if
you moved them around. He was nervous if you took even one off the shelf—you
could feel it, a kind of tensing. 392
If you get tired of shelving books and carrying a torch for
the one that got away. 485
Literature References
I thanked him and turned to go back to the
booth, but he tapped me on the shoulder. I wish he hadn’t done that. It was
like being tapped by Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who stoppeth one of three. 20
I felt like a man reading a very grim book. A Thomas Hardy
novel, say. You know how it’s going to end, but instead of spoiling things,
that somehow increases your fascination. It’s like watching a kid run his
electric train faster and faster and waiting for it to derail on one of the
curves. 58
The fall colors began to bloom—first timid yellow, then
orange, then blazing, strumpet red as autumn burned away another Maine summer.
There were cardboard boxes filled with coverless paperbacks at the market, and
I must have read three dozen or more: mysteries by Ed McBain, John D.
MacDonald, Chester Himes, and Richard S. Prather; steamy melodramas like Peyton
Place and a Stone for Danny fisher; westerns by the score; and one
science-fiction novel called The Lincoln Hunters, which concerned
time-travelers trying to record a “forgotten” speech by Abraham Lincoln. 270
I’d read a book called A Reliable Wife not too long before
leaving on the world’s strangest trip, and as I climbed into bed, a line from
the novel crossed my mind: “He had lost the habit of romance.” 342
I was at my desk on the morning of August 27th, working away
at The Murder Place in a pair of basketball shorts and nothing else, when the doorbell rang. 343
Mimi, who thought Catcher in the Rye belonged in the school
library, and who wasn’t adverse to a nice boink on Saturday night. 344
I spent my days there, cooking her meals, working in her
little garden (which would sicken but not quite die in another hot central Texas
summer), and reading Bleak House to her. 599
I was reading (or pretending to read) the latest James Bond,
The Spy Who Loved Me. 601
We read books sitting side by side on her couch, with her
fan blowing back our hair—The Group for her, Jude the Obscure for me. 644
Found myself listening to Sadie as she read to me, first
Jude the Obscure, then Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I knew those stories, and listening
to them again was comforting.
675
The lady or the tiger? I don’t know, I don’t know. 828
