Started The Stand, but putting it aside

I mentioned in my last post that I wanted to read The Stand after reading Stephen King's On Writing. A week ago, I started reading it. Two hundred pages later, I'm putting it aside. Everything that I dislike about other Stephen King novels I've tried to read before are in The Stand. King suffers from what he himself calls "diarrhea of the word processor." His fans call it character development, but I just find it long, boring, and unnecessary. Will I continue reading The Stand in the future? Maybe. In the meantime, I'm going to start reading Catching Fire, the second book in Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games series. I read The Hunger Games about two months ago and loved it. After a week of diarrhea, it's time for something better.