My journey with this book began in the summer of 2019, when I decided I’d read this during my summer vacation in Italy. Eventually, I did start reading it, but I just barely got past the first 100 pages. While I really loved the recent film adaptations, I was anything but an avid reader. We travel four years into the future, it’s summer 2023, and I fall in love with King’s work. I start my journey to read every book of his. Having already read 9, I now have to decide if this will be my next one, totaling a whopping 1376 pages in the edition I own. So I ultimately did start reading ‘It’, and I’m glad I did. The longes book I ever read by like 700 pages, ‘’Salem’s Lot’ was the longest one I read in the last couple of years, it was like climbing a mountain in a way. Not that it was a chore to read, but it felt like huge undertaking. And I’m more than just impressed by what King manages to accomplis with this beast of a story. You’re like 300 pages in and you can still feel that you’re just at the beginning, that King still isn’t done introducing you to the town and character and I loved that. The sheer amount of stuff in this is insane and the way he manages to intertwine these two time-periods in a way that makes them complement each other perfectly and how he sets-up things in one of them that then become central in the other one is amazing. And not just that, there are whole chapters that dig into Derry’s history and tell various stories of the towns past in a way that perfectly adds to the main story. And the character writing is just amazing. I loved these kids so much, all of them. I couldn’t even tell you who I liked most, cause King gives all of them their equal share of time and personality. And after spending so much time with them as I’ve never spend with any other character, I was really sad when I eventually had to leave them. The last like 40 pages almost made me cry multiple times. King also captures childhood, memories, friendship, growing-up and growing-apart in this beautiful, yet painful melancholic way that makes you smile all the time, but them makes you so sad at the end, especially when the final forgetting sets in. ‘It’ is a monumental achievement in writing and rightly one of the most celebrated, iconic and culturally influential works of horror-fiction of all time. It’s an amazing book.