K&R was a very interesting read for me, but not actually for the description of the C language, but because it describes why certain features in C look the way they do, and because it is also surprisingly and refreshingly critical towards the language (e.g. it basically admits that the function pointer syntax was a mistake).

It also corrected my oversimplified view that C is a simple and small language simply because it is an old language, but it was already a simple and small language compared to other languages in the late 60's 'programming language zoo'.

All the code examples are deeply rooted in the 80's programmer mindset though, and are not very relevant for "modern C".