Derleth, I had the same thought. I didn’t read the Dark Tower series until many years after I read Insomnia, and the book worked just fine for me without it. I suppose it’s got a lot more layers to it when you’re familiar with DT (I don’t have any plans to go back and reread it), but it works just fine as a standalone book IMO.
I liked “Insomnia” just fine - I appreciated that it had elderly protagonists, which very few novels do. It actually changed the way I see old people - for one thing, I realized that I don’t actually see them - my eye just glossed right over them. Good job for that, Stephen.
Okay, you made me have to look:
Insomnia (the linked edition at least) has 916 pages. Not quite It-sized, but that’s pretty darn big, even for King. By contrast, this edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel has only 720 pages.
Yes, agree completely. There is no way a book with an opening scene like Rose Madder had, one of the most horrifying things he’s ever written, should rank behind the comparatively execrable Lisey’s Story.
Wow, I consider myself a fan, but going through that list I was surprised to realize that with most of his later stuff, I’ve read it just one single time. I would then say to myself, “Thank god it wasn’t nearly as bad as Dreamcatcher”, and stick it on the shelf. I really need to go back and try some of these again.
I’ve always been of the opinion that The Shining was the best of his work, and I guess I’ll stick with that for now. However, Misery constantly moves up in my estimation. If I pick it up and read any random paragraph, chances are that I’ll keep going until it has to be physically taken from me. The writing really holds up to my warm happy memories of it. And I do have warm fuzzies for that book…it was my much anticipated seventeenth birthday present and possibly the first King I owned in hardcover.
I haven’t re-read “Misery” in a long time - it might be time. 
I might be in the minority - I like his older stuff, but I love his newer stuff - it seems like his talent has really matured, and he’s left some of his “gross people out just for the sake of grossing them out” behind.
I want to read The Stand; I’ve never read it before. Should I get the uncut edition or the original?
For that matter, while it really isn’t very good, “Rose Madder” is a lot better than “Lisey’s Story,” which I couldn’t even finish.
I prefer the uncut version, myself. And The Stand is, in my view, his best solo work (I mean solo as in stand-alone. The Dark Tower series is equally as good, but involves multiple books). It’s a difference of about 200 pages between the uncut version and the edited one.
Tough call - I agree with others who say that the parts were edited out of the book for a reason, but on the other hand, some of the parts in the uncut book are quite good - I liked the vignettes of people dying regular deaths while the apocalypse was going on, and while The Kid was disturbing as hell, I don’t know if the book is better without him in it.
See for yourself - read the uncut version. 
Insomnia is probably my least favourite Stephen King novel and I agreed with just about everything he said. To be fair, I mostly gave up reading late-period Stephen King after Insomnia, so it’s entirely possible he got worse after that.
The beginning was kind of intriguing, but I lost interest after the story devolved into cosmic alien mumbo-jumbo. Unfortunately, there were probably 600 pages still left at that point…
my only Stephen King book I own is Carrie, don’t get me wrong he’s a great writer but I never had the time to read except books for school.
I was surprised too see it listed in 10th place.
I thought it would be in the top 5.
He’s written 64 books - the odds weren’t good.
The odds were good, he wrote a lot of crap. 
Personally, I would put the short story collections, Carrie, Firestarter, and maybe Cujo higher, and drop The Green Mile, Misery, and especially the awful It lower.
The Dark Tower series never entered my radar screen for whatever reason. For me, the appeal of King has always been that he roots his stories in ordinary life; I just don’t look to him for a sci-fi/fantasy world.
Uh, high school was kind of a boring time for me, I suppose. I honestly don’t remember it being anywhere near that long, but I remember the plot well enough I must have read it. Odd.
I read a bit of King back then. I liked Thinner, Different Seasons (mother of thousands of hours of TV, given how often TBS replayed Shawshank Redemption back then (now, if only someone would option “The Breathing Method”)), and my favorite was Misery, and I don’t remember any of them being long long. Just nicely long, as opposed to the novella-sized YA books I was being assigned back then. (Except for the Faulkner. And the James. I belonged in that AP English class, but some of the books didn’t.)
I loved that story, but I don’t know how that would work as a movie - the whole thing kind of hinges on the shock value of the body continuing to breathe and give birth after it’s been killed, and that’s just one scene.
I know, I know. I wasn’t being very serious. It might work as a story within a completely different movie, told partly in flashback to preserve the integrity of the one essential scene.
Just give it to Peter Jackson, he’ll make a trilogy out of it. 
It actually appears to be heavily tied into the Dark Tower stuff, but you have to be a Dark Tower reader to see the tie-ins. Which is good craftsmanship on King’s part. However, in the end, he (Dark Tower spoiler)
fucks up all the connections between Insomnia and the Dark Tower in the last or second-to-last DT book by saying that it was a false shadow or false prophecy or something. So…it never really does tie in.