Seventy or Eighty Books a Year
King's most-quoted line about his own reading appears in On Writing: "I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, mostly fiction." The detail that he calls himself a slow reader is important — King's volume comes not from speed-reading tricks but from relentless consistency and stolen minutes. He has kept this pace for decades while also writing prolifically, which is part of why other authors find the number startling. The mix is overwhelmingly fiction, because King believes a novelist learns the most from immersion in stories rather than from craft manuals. The figure has become a benchmark in reading culture, repeated everywhere from Goodreads to Ripley's, precisely because it pairs an ambitious number with a humble self-description.
Read a Lot, Write a Lot: The Core Rule
The engine of King's whole philosophy is a single sentence from On Writing: "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut." He frames reading as the non-negotiable input that makes writing possible — and states the stakes bluntly: "If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that." King is not precious about what counts. He argues that you learn from bad books as much as good ones, because a clumsy novel shows you exactly what to avoid, while a great one shows you what is possible. Reading, in his model, is constant calibration of your own taste and skill.
How King Finds the Time: Reading in Small Sips
King's volume is built on a deliberate technique for using fragments of time. "I take a book with me everywhere I go," he writes in On Writing, "and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in. The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows." He is specific about where those sips happen: "Waiting rooms were made for books — of course! But so are theater lobbies before the show, long and boring checkout lines, and everyone's favorite, the john." He also embraced audiobooks early, noting that "you can even read while you're driving, thanks to the audiobook revolution," and that "anywhere from six to a dozen" of his yearly books are on tape. The lesson is structural: the books get read because King refuses to let dead time stay dead.
The Reader Who Became a Writer
King traces his entire career back to a childhood spent reading, much of it the cheap horror and science-fiction paperbacks and comics he could get his hands on growing up in modest circumstances in Maine. He has written movingly about the first book that truly seized him — William Golding's Lord of the Flies, which he encountered around age twelve. In his introduction to a centenary edition of the novel, King called it "the first book with hands — strong ones that reached out of the pages and seized me by the throat," a book that told him fiction could be "life or death" rather than mere entertainment. That early reading directly shaped his work: he named the fictional town of Castle Rock after the mountain stronghold in Golding's novel, and the book's themes of childhood and savagery echo through It and Hearts in Atlantis. King is, in his own telling, a reader who happened to start writing.
King's Taste: From Literary Fiction to Old-School Horror
Although the public knows King as the king of horror, his reading runs far wider than the genre. His list of ten favorite novels, shared via Goodreads, leans literary: Golding's Lord of the Flies, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, George Orwell's 1984, Philip Roth's American Pastoral, Richard Adams's Watership Down, and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings among them. He is a vocal champion of contemporary fiction too, regularly using his large social-media following to spotlight new and lesser-known novels he admires. When he does write about horror specifically — most thoroughly in his 1981 non-fiction study Danse Macabre — he treats the genre as serious literature, praising Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House as one of the finest horror novels of the century. King reads as a connoisseur of the whole field, not a specialist defending one corner of it.
What King Wants Readers to Take From His Habit
King's reading life distills into a few transferable principles. First, volume comes from consistency, not speed — a self-described slow reader still finishes seventy or eighty books a year by reading every single day. Second, carry a book (or load an audiobook) and fill the gaps; the waiting room and the checkout line are reading time in disguise. Third, read widely and without snobbery, because bad books teach by negative example and great books raise the ceiling of what you think is possible. Fourth, read in your own field and far outside it — King the horror writer counts Orwell, Roth, and Tolkien among his favorites. The throughline is that reading is a daily, lifelong practice rather than an occasional indulgence, and that practice is what builds both taste and craft.
