I recently finished reading The Gunslinger, the first book in Stephen King's The Dark Tower series.
While I found the story itself kind of hard to get into and follow at times, I liked the writing, if that makes sense. I like his use of language. He's not afraid to use $12 words that you have to look up. He's not afraid to make up words; he describes one character's smile as "scarifying," and I think that's awesome.
But I think what I actually enjoyed more were his anecdotes about writing in the afterword. He tells a story about how he and 2 of his fellow writing students in college (one of whom later became his wife) found several reams of oddly-sized, colored typing paper that someone had thrown away. Being poor college students, and going through a lot of paper in the days before rewrites and editing could be done digitally, they kept them*. All three of them became successful writers. King jokes that it's like something out of one of his stories.
*I love hearing one of the most successful writers of my lifetime talk about being a paper hoarder, which I also am.
He talks about how he fell in love with moody Romantic** poetry his sophomore year in college. I did too, though not with the same Romantic-era poet. He seems to think this is universal to college sophomores.
**He's referring to the period in particular, though many of the works by the author he refers to are also romantic in the sense of being love poems.
I like reading introductions and afterwords written by the writers of the book I'm reading. It makes me feel like I know them better. Stephen King is one of those who I feel like I know well. I feel like he, Neil Gaiman, and I are buddies, even though I have no closer connection to either than to following Neil Gaiman's Facebook posts. But I feel they are cool, interesting, and genuine dudes who would be the sort of guys you could kick back and have dinner with (when you're not all hastily scribbling ideas on your napkin).