I love the way he builds the characters in his stories, it might just be me getting sucked into the book but it feels as though I actually know them

I actually picked that up on release, haven't started it yet though but it's on my 2023 read list

I still think about Crispin pretty often

I'm definitely going to watch the film again to compare them now I know what happens in the book

As someone who grew up in Maine - can confirm. We’re an odd bunch.

I've only read the shinning and doctor sleep but my mum used to read his other stories to me when I was little and from what I can remember they were pretty good

A clockwork orange

The Kite Runner, Fahrenheit 451, and The Outsiders

The Lord of the Rings.

A Separate Peace.

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I read Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo in my senior year. It's still one of the most impactful books I have ever read, and cannot recommend it highly enough.

I always chalked it up to regional dialect as well, maybe with a touch of nostalgia for the era in which King was a child.

The Jitterbug Perfume

The Bell Jar

Kids/young people aren't his main target audience I'd suspect. FWIW, I think people tend to assume that if he writes something a certain way he is entirely out of touch, but I think he knows what he's doing when he does that because his point is to create a feel of a place, and plenty of rural places are a bit like living in ghost towns that are relics from the 70s and 80s. It's the feel of those places, IMO, that he's after, and if you've lived in, or been to, those areas, he gets the feel pretty spot on. We live in one. We still have an arcade. People are still driving trucks from the 1980s. They still talk like rednecks because they and their parents and their grandparents have never left town to expand their world and so they want everything to stay the same. That's pretty common in rural areas.

The last book in Libba Bray's Gemma Doyle trilogy. It made me rethink my thoughts on a lot of things that I have in this day and age because of the differences between 1890s teenage life and post-2000 teenage life.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin. It showed me how limited women's roles were in Victorian times and still are in more traditional communities, but Edna chose to swim against the current (literally and figuratively). Although Western women today have more choices than Edna, we can't take them for granted, because social progress can go backwards.

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Dragon riders of pern really introduced me to high fantasy, and made the way for my love of all things medieval; Orson Scott cards 'Ender' series introduced me to sci-fi in ways only start trek can touch. Anne Rice gave me a dance with the devil with lestat the vampire and gang. There wasn't a singular book that changed my life, it was every book I opened that made my world a little bit bigger.

Catch-22 for me too. I read it so often in high school I could practically reconstruct the plot chronologically.

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You are going to get a lot of Catcher in the Rye, but for me probably Lord of the Flies

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Sorry sweetie, but any novel that depicts violence, murder, SA or any other sinful behavior yet DOESN’T explicitly state in the foreword that the author thinks those things are bad attached to a formal apology (if author is deceased an apology from the estate will be deemed sufficient on a case by case basis by me), that author is problematic, period 💅 I personally can’t read, so the main content I consume is advertisements. Commercials radiate positive, wholesome energy and stand firmly behind what they say!