11/22/63 Audiobook Length: Is It Worth Thirty Hours?

Yes, if you can give it long uninterrupted blocks. It runs thirty hours and forty minutes, read by Craig Wasson, and it earns them. The hard stretch arrives around hour twenty and it recovers. Skip it if you listen in twenty-minute fragments, or if this would be your first very long audiobook.

That is the question this page is actually about. Not whether the book is good. Whether it is worth thirty hours of your life, which is a different question and almost nobody answers it.

I did both formats, and the audiobook is the one I remember. That tells you something on its own.

No spoilers here. I will describe effects, not events.

How long is it, exactly?

Thirty hours and forty minutes, unabridged, Craig Wasson narrating for Simon & Schuster Audio, released on 8 November 2011.

If you have seen a different number, you are not confused. The shops genuinely disagree. Apple Books, Audible UK and Audiobooks.com all show thirty hours and forty minutes. Two different library records for the same recording show 30:37:51 and 30:40:42. Everand rounds it to thirty hours. Hoopla says thirty-one, and so does Simon & Schuster's own product page for the edition they publish. Kirkus lists it at thirty-five hours, which is not right for this recording.

So, if you see thirty and a half, or thirty-one, it is the same book and the same performance. Call it a little over thirty hours and stop worrying about the minutes.

Where does it get hard?

Around hour twenty.

I want to be precise about that, because it is the number I could not find anywhere before I listened, and it is the number I would have wanted. Not "the middle sags". Hour twenty, of a little over thirty, roughly two-thirds of the way in.

It landed on me as fatigue rather than boredom, which I think matters. I was not bored and I was not tempted to quit. I was aware, for the first time, of how much book was still in front of me. Then it passed.

I never seriously thought about bailing. The next section is probably why.

Why does the drag land later in your ears than on the page?

This is the part I have not seen written anywhere, and it is the argument for treating a long audiobook as a different commitment from a long book.

In print, you feel the page count. You can see the brick in your hand, you know roughly how much is left, and I think that awareness pulls the drag forward. Critics reading it on the page put the slow stretch earlier than I hit it. Patrick T. Reardon, reviewing what he calls "an 849-page science-fiction novel", says the first three hundred pages are gripping and then: "This is where the novel drags. For nearly 400 pages." He says the pace "finally picks up again" around page 660. That works out to roughly the middle half of his copy, though the span is my arithmetic on his sentences rather than a range he prints. Joey Lombardi writes that the book "drags in the middle". Mark Lawson, in the Guardian, raises a reservation about where the story begins before ultimately defending the way King built it.

Listening, there is no physical sense of what remains. A progress bar is not a brick. So, the stretch those three critics hit at the halfway mark did not register for me until considerably later, and when it did it registered as tiredness rather than as a slog.

One caution on the page numbers, because it is the kind of thing that trips people up. Reardon's 849 pages is the 2011 Scribner hardcover. The trade paperback in print now runs 880. Page counts move with the edition, running times move with the recording, and neither one converts into the other.

Does Craig Wasson hold up over thirty hours?

Yes. This is the question I most expected to answer with a qualification, and I did not need one.

A voice that works beautifully for five hours can grate at thirty. Character voices that charm you in the first act can wear through by the fourth. Neither happened. He held, and on a commitment this size the stamina is not a pleasant extra, it is the reason the thing survived at all.

He is a recurring King narrator, so some listeners arrive already knowing the voice. Simon & Schuster Audio has him on Full Dark, No Stars in 2010 as one of two credited readers, this book in 2011, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams in 2015 as one of several, and 1922 in 2017.

Narration: 4.5.

Does it need the length?

It earned every hour. I would not cut it.

That is a real distinction and worth being precise about, because plenty of long books are good books with a tail. This is not one of those. The premise keeps generating consequences instead of just extending, and the length is doing work rather than accumulating.

How should you actually listen to it?

This may be the most useful thing on the page, and it is the part no product listing can tell you.

Standard speed, no acceleration. Almost all of it on flights between Texas and the Northeast for work, some of it in hotel rooms at night.

That is not incidental. It might be the whole reason thirty hours was survivable. A flight is a block of time you cannot escape and cannot fill with anything better, so a long book stops being a commitment and becomes the thing that makes the block bearable. The book was not competing with my life. It was competing with the seatback in front of me, and it won easily.

If you are trying to fit thirty hours into a commute in twenty-minute increments, you have a harder version of this than I did. Not impossible. Harder. The book has long stretches that want continuity, and a fragmented listen is exactly where the middle would hurt most.

So, the practical advice: save this one for a period when you have long uninterrupted blocks. Travel, a move, a stretch of driving. Do not start it in a week of errands.

Does the ending hold?

It held for me.

I flag it specifically because the close draws objections of its own, and because those are separate from the middle. The two get discussed as though they were one problem and they are not.

The published record here is lopsided rather than balanced, and I would rather say so than manufacture two even sides. Reardon calls the closing fifty or sixty pages an "anti-climax" that "fritters itself". Ron Charles, in the Washington Post, finds one element "too casually rendered" and in the same review says the ending is redeemed by its final note, which is one critic landing on both sides of his own sentence. Earl J. Woods calls it a "satisfying ending".

Neither the middle nor the close landed on me the way the complaints predict. Yours may differ, and now you know who thinks what.

Is there more than one recording?

Not one that I could find. The download, the thirty-disc CD set, the MP3-CD, the library editions, the Playaway and the UK release from Hodder are all the same Craig Wasson performance under different identifiers and territories.

If you are buying secondhand or borrowing, the narrator credit is the tell. No second English recording turned up in the product records I checked, which is not quite the same as saying none exists.

What should you know before you start?

Content guidance, so you can decide rather than be surprised. This book contains violence, murder and death, gun and knife violence, domestic violence and child abuse, racism and racial slurs, misogyny, alcoholism, terminal illness and medical trauma, suicide, grief, injury and gore, and a serious road accident.

Two of those are named in the published criticism rather than only in reader-maintained guidance: Mark Lawson names racism in his Guardian review, and ABC Radio National names domestic violence and ingrained racism. The fuller list above comes from community-maintained content-guidance databases, which are useful and are not author-approved. I am naming topics, never scenes.

One more thing worth knowing before you commit. This is not King the horror writer. Arrive from the horror shelf and you get historical fiction with a romance at its centre.

Is this a good first long audiobook?

I do not think so, and it is a close call.

Against starting here: a newcomer who hits a rough patch at hour twenty has no calibration telling them that long books do this and recover. The odds they quit are high, and quitting a thirty-hour book teaches you the wrong lesson about the format rather than about this book.

For starting here: the opening moves fast, Wasson is easy to stay with, and it worked on me.

But I should be honest about why that last point is weaker than it looks. I had read this one in print first, so I was not going in cold. I knew the shape of it. A first-timer would not, and that is exactly the difference that decides whether hour twenty is a dip or an exit.

Start somewhere shorter. If you want to stay with King while you do it, On Writing runs nine hours and he reads it himself, which is a third of the commitment and a completely different kind of listen. Come back to this one when you already know what a long book feels like in the middle.

Who should skip it?

Anyone who can only listen in fragments. I had captive blocks on flights and that is most of why this worked for me. If your listening life is twenty minutes at a time between other things, this book asks for a continuity you cannot give it, and the stretch that cost me a little at hour twenty will cost you a lot more.

Anyone who abandons books easily. My own dip came at hour twenty, and the stretch leading into it runs for hours before that. So, this book takes fifteen or twenty hours off you before it asks the hard question. If you are someone who bails the moment a book stops earning, understand that the cost of bailing here is already sunk by the time you consider it.

Anyone who needs constant plot pressure. This is the one I would argue hardest. The middle is a slow domestic stretch in a small Texas town, and for a long time it reads more like literary fiction than like a thriller. If you came for the premise and expect the premise to drive every hour, you will feel the engine cut out. It is less a flaw than a genre switch mid-book, and it is the best predictor I know of who bounces off this.

Common questions

How many hours is the 11/22/63 audiobook? Thirty hours and forty minutes, unabridged. Storefronts display anything from thirty hours to thirty-one for the same recording, so treat small differences as rounding rather than as a different edition.

Is it abridged? No. The Craig Wasson recording is unabridged, and every English package I checked is that same performance.

Can I borrow it instead of buying it? Often, yes. It sits in the Libby and OverDrive catalogues and in hoopla, though whether you personally can borrow it depends on what your library has licensed. On a thirty-hour commitment that is worth checking before you spend anything.

Is the television series the same story? 11.22.63 is the eight-part 2016 adaptation starring James Franco, and as of this writing it streams on Netflix rather than on Hulu. It is a separate thing from the book. Watch for a tie-in print edition when you shop, because the cover you land on is not always the edition you meant to buy.

Should I read it or listen to it? I did both and I would listen. That is a preference rather than a verdict, and the hours are the reason: the audiobook is the version I still remember.

Where I come out

Writing: 4.0. Narration: 4.5.

If a friend told me they had thirty hours to spend, I would tell them to spend them here, and then I would ask them when. That second question is the one that decides it. Give this book flights, a long drive, a week of early mornings, and it will hold you for all thirty hours with one tired patch two-thirds of the way through. Give it the gaps between errands and it will feel like homework.

It is worth thirty hours. Just not thirty hours of anybody's leftovers.