Honestly, I think any programmer writing C today should have it around for reference. And yeah you kinda need to read it too, or you won't be able to refer much.
That said, no need to read it cover to cover. There's stuff one can earmark as being there but ignore until it's actually needed (for example: the grammar and all the library functions).
And speaking of tedu, I would recommend to the OP that they get in the habit of checking out the OpenBSD man pages for libc functions.
