I don’t know what it is about this week. Maybe it knows that next week, and even the week after, are going to be considerably busier and it’s over-compensating. But oh man has there ever been nothing to write about this week.
I finished listening to It finally this afternoon. As I said here, it’s not a perfect book — it’s too big, in length and subject both, for anything like that — and it maybe is a little too long in places. Also, some of the characters — okay, Beverly mostly — get a little short-changed if not outright abused.
(There is, however, a nice moment nearer to the end when King takes what seems to have been his forgetting a character for several long chapters, and in fact maybe even confusing him with another character, and turns that into a feature. That the characters are interchangeable actually becomes somewhat important to the plot, and it’s a moment when you can maybe see the craft of the writing at work: King turning a first-draft mistake into an asset. Of course, it’s possible I’m just imagining that, and he had the whole thing planned out from page one. But, having read enough of King’s thoughts about writing, I don’t think that’s the way he works.)
Anyway, I really did enjoy revisiting it. I thought Steven Weber did a really excellent job reading the book, and the parts I hadn’t remembered well — I read it when I was a teenager — were some of the best parts.