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I was 15 years old when I first read It. I was in my first year of high school (or rather its Swedish equivalent), and my Monday schedule was an odd one: after my German class in the morning I had five free periods. Nine Mondays out of ten I'd spend these hours in a sofa at the tea-drinkers' club: a small, cosy room under the eaves of the old school building, where no teacher would venture. There I learnt to play Mah-Jong and Bridge, had five cups of tea a day or more, wrote a lot of bad poetry (intentionally bad, mostly; we had a designated notebook for that) -- and read a lot. And It became the strongest reading experience of that semester; I hadn't really read any horror before, and deifnitely nothing by Stephen King. The last 100 or so pages I read in one sitting, on one of those Mondays when I had all the time in the world to sit reading. What I remember most about it is how the club room was filled with people when I started reading; when I put the book down, head swimming, it was empty and I honestly hadn't noticed them all leaving, though some of them must have been climbing over my seat. . . I haven't had many reading experiences quite that intense, although a memorable one is the last part of Lord of Emperors by G G Kay (the sequel to Sailing to Sarantium) ; that was during the 2000 Eastercon, and the 50 last pages or so I read at the dead dog party, with 300 happy fans milling, mingling and making merry around me (and throwing paper aeroplanes at each other.) I didn't notice, see or hear a thing; I was completely enthralled of the book and, I must admit, weeping by the end of it.

And now I'm rereading It for the first time in 14 years, and it is still very gripping, though maybe not quite so much so as it was in 1988. For one thing, 1985, when the book takes place, is so distant now.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 15:47 0 comments