BEWARE OF SPOILERS

Saturday 24 September 2011

It : 24th September 2011

ITI've found that the latter stages of each book become almost as much about looking to the next one as finding out how this one turns out.  It's something I've come to regretfully accept as part of my being able to keep things, however slowly, moving.  With a couple of them, the steam-ahead mentality has definitely encroached on the current book and my immersion in it.  Most recently this was definitely the case with The Talisman.  To a lesser extent, it also affected Skeleton Crew.  The loom of a 1000+ pages and both the reputation and my own memories of the book will do that to you, though.

I'm looking forward to It though.  I can't remember a lot about it from my reading of it as a kid, which pleases me more than the failure of my memory worries me.  One thing that keeps cropping up in my mind when facing this book, or any of such a prodigious girth, is the feeling I always had as a kid where I couldn't fathom ever finishing the thing.  From my crawling start of new books, tapping away at the outer shell of the story, waiting for the crack to appear before I could wheedle my way inside, the road seemed so long and the horizon so far away that just getting moving seemed hard to realise.

Of course I always did and the walk through the first chapters turned into a jog and a run through the middle and a sprint to the finish.  But the cycle always reset and I'd return to that same awed approach to the next one.  I'm a bit older now, so the awe is considerably diminished (until I think about the writing process involved in creating these behemoths) but, facing It, there's a glimmer of it there.  It's just a case of putting one foot in front of the other and turning the page...

I was trying to show the heft of the book with the picture and thought I'd use another for comparison.  There was only one choice.  This shit writes itself sometimes.  Or maybe it's the Fornits.

1 comment:

  1. 'It' is my absolute favourite Stephen King book. Everytime I read it, I get just as scared as the time before, which basically never happens once I already know how something ends. But yeah, it is pretty big and intimidating to start with.

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