Response post for this week

This week I read alot of the book It and right now I'm not at a very scary point. I'm currently on a really big chapter of about 100 pages that describes Ben Hanscom's childhood. He was a chubby child in 5th grade when he first saw It. He was "in love" with Bev Marsh, one of the girls who also witnessed It that summer and was involved in the promise. Ben has no friends, yet the book says if someone asked him if he were lonely, he wouldn't really know what that meant. The narrator compared it to being blind at birth--someone blind at birth wouldn't fully understand what being blind is, because they've been so accustomed to it their whole life. It's the same for Ben. He's been so used to never having friends, always finding comfort in food and books and imagination, that he's never really understood what being lonely was.

In his town of Derry (during 1958), 5 children of all ages had been murdered, and all the bodies had been found completely mutilated and destroyed. Due to this, police made a curfew of 7 o'clock for all children, until the "psychopath" was found. Ben remembers his mother setting him down on the couch, and making him promise to be at dinner every night at the exact same time every summer, or else she'd call the police and put in a "lost child" notice. He says "Yes, Mamma, I promise to be home every night at the right time." She gives him a Timex watch, and then asks him if he's seen anything suspicious at all, and he is so entranced by the watch, and he doesn't want to upset his mother...he decides to not tell his mother about the clown he saw. And that night, the clown shows up in his dreams. He wakes up with tears on his pillow, not remembering his dream...

I really like this book and I hope I can finish it over the next few weeks. Its over a thousand pages long, so it'll be tough to finish quickly.

On a happy note, I've discovered that I've read over 1,000 pages of my own choosing this quarter. I haven't read that much of books I actually wanted to in a long time, so I feel really really good about it! :)