SLOW READ: The Stand (Chapters 52 - 55)

We’re nearing the end of our Outlander Slow Read, but we also needed a minute to talk about everything else on our nightstands. Fall is Laura’s favorite reading season, partly because the big, weighty books land this time of year and the awards lists start rolling in. We started with what we’ve been reading. (Sarah is head over heels for Kingsolver’s Partita, which feels like a writer with nothing left to prove showing you exactly how good she is anyway. Laura is 12% in and not hooked, so I’m working on her.) We talked into the literary controversies of 2026. We covered AI in publishing, Rachel Cusk’s Life of M and the Natalie Portman of it all. We closed with Sarah’s son Griffin, who is 500 pages into It and ready to quit. Laura explained why it’s her all-time favorite, so I’ll be delivering a pep talk and reporting back. Book club is this week, and we’ll announce our next Slow Read before Thanksgiving. It starts in January and is open to everyone. Head to slowread.substack.com to nominate what we read next! Books We Mentioned What we’re reading * Partita by Barbara Kingsolver * Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver * So Big by Edna Ferber * Giant by Edna Ferber * Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus * Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus * Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel * Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel * The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel * Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler * Under Story by Chloe Benjamin * Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert * John of John by Douglas Stuart * Mestra by Madeline Miller * Circe by Madeline Miller * An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good by Helene Tursten * Hollywood Ending by John Green The controversies * Life of M by Rachel Cusk * Outline by Rachel Cusk * The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger * The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus * Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott * Famesick by Lena Dunham * The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson * The Tell by Amy Griffin * How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan * Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi Adaptations and Stephen King * Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders * East of Eden by John Steinbeck * Carrie by Stephen King * It by Stephen King * The Stand by Stephen King * Outlander by Diana Gabaldon Thank you Jessie Benkert, Heather Jones, Tracie Omit, Christie T, Erin Feeney, and many others for tuning into our live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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We hopped on live in the middle of a Tuesday to officially kick off Season Two and hundreds of you showed ready to talk summer reading and get excited about Outlander. Laura and I had two very different reading summers. We talked about that and which books we both really loved or really didn’t. We talked about the books of the summer (looking at you Yesteryear!). We talked about the fall lineup of new releases which is insane. Also, we talked about what you need to know to tackle Outlander with us. Outlander is broken into seven parts, and we’re doing eight episodes because we split one of them. Our first episode, covering Part One, drops Monday, August 31st. Part One is about seventy pages. If you want to stay with us, have it read by the 31st. The Slow Read Outlander season is members only this time. Bookmark slowread.substack.com for the reading schedule, the meeting schedule, the Zoom links, and replays of anything you miss. The printable bookmark is here. If you’re a slow reader who’s sitting Outlander out, we’re not going anywhere — we’ve got other episodes and goodies sprinkled through the fall. But if you want in on these episodes, come join us. We don’t know yet whether we’re going to love this book. We do know we’re going to have fun. Every book we mentioned Overview * American Hagwon — Min Jin Lee * Partita — Barbara Kingsolver * Peck & Peck — Bonnie Garmus * The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict — Priya Parker * Exit Party — Emily St. John Mandel * Under Story — Chloe Benjamin * Big Little Truths — Liane Moriarty * The Pirate Queen — Ariel Lawhon The big three of the summer * Yesteryear — Caro Claire Burke * The Calamity Club — Kathryn Stockett * The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion — Beth Brower Literary fiction * Land — Maggie O’Farrell * Whistler — Ann Patchett * The Things We Never Say — Elizabeth Strout * North Woods — Daniel Mason * Country People — Daniel Mason Nonfiction * How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University — Theo Baker * This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History — Beverly Gage * G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century — Beverly Gage * Famesick: A Memoir — Lena Dunham Everything else * Mad Mabel — Sally Hepworth * Dear Monica Lewinsky — Julia Langbein * Kitten — Stacey Yu * June Baby — Shannon Garvey * Girl’s Girl — Sonia Feldman * The Shampoo Effect — Jenny Jackson * The Great Wherever — Shannon Sanders What we’re slow reading * Outlander — Diana Gabaldon * The Stand — Stephen King * War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy Next Up: Our first Outlander episode covering Part One drops Monday, August 31st. It’s about 70 pages — read it however slow reading works for you. The reading schedule and printable bookmark are both waiting for you at slowread.substack.com.

We finished The Stand. Six months in Boulder, and we made it out alive — well, most of us did. And now we get to tell you what we’ve been dying to announce: our next Slow Read is Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander. Here’s the part you need to hear first, because it changes things. Unlike The Stand, which we gave away free to everyone, the entire Outlander read this fall lives behind the paywall. Every main episode breaking down the chapters, every book club meeting, every unhinged side quest — members only. If you want to take this journey with us, now’s the time to join. The Stand episodes, we had to edit ourselves — pull whole sections, watch what we said, because the internet is the internet. Outlander has one of the most intense, passionate fandoms out there (they call Diana herself, like a deity — we’ll get into it). Behind the paywall, it’s just us and you. No torching on Twitter, no walking on eggshells. Our true feelings, full unhinged selves, the way a book club is supposed to be. A few reasons we are genuinely thrilled about this one: It’s Outlander. It’s been everywhere for a decade, the TV show just wrapped, and it sits right in the cultural water — but it’s also double-intimidating: a 50-million-copy series with nine books, novellas, graphic novels, a whole universe. Reading the first one together means you finally get to be conversant in this giant piece of pop culture, without committing to all 10,000 pages alone. Diana herself is a delight. Marine biology and zoology degrees, a PhD, a side hustle writing Scrooge McDuck comics, and she wrote Outlander on a lark as practice — never thinking anyone would read it. “Science and art are two sides of the same coin,” she says. “What they both rest on is the ability to draw patterns out of chaos.” We fell a little in love. And this time, both of us are going in blind. With The Stand, Laura knew the big picture and led the way. For Outlander, neither of us has read it — so we’re discovering it right alongside you. People say it’s intense. Possibly even slightly traumatizing. (Laura says that’s a selling point.) Here’s what to do: Join as a paid member now, and you get everything. Spend the rest of the summer catching up on our side quests from the first half of the year — the one we did on death is, no exaggeration, some of our best work. Plus, we’ll have a couple fun summer episodes for you. Then our whole Outlander adventure officially kicks off August 3rd, when we release the reading schedule. Book club meetings, watch-alongs, all the bonuses — it’s all included once you’re in. We’re all going to need a good, healthy, entertaining distraction this fall. Let this be it. Happy summer reading, y’all — see you in Scotland.

Welcome to SLOW READ, where we tackle the books you’ve always wanted to read at a pace you can handle. Hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura Tremaine We are currently reading The Stand by Stephen King (unabridged version) You can find our full Reading Schedule here Join the SLOW READ community on Substack for bonus episodes, book club meetings, and Side Quests with Sarah & Laura We have come to the end of our journey with The Stand by Stephen King. In this episode, we dissect what it all meant and what we’ll remember about this experience. Make sure to subscribe on Substack for our next SLOW READ! Mentioned: Wolf Hall War and Peace Don Quixote Brothers Karamazov Blazing Eye Sees All Sister Helen Prejean / Dead Man Walking The Circle That Doesn’t Close Laura: We are here today at the end of The Stand by Stephen King to close the circle. Sarah: But I think it’s a lie. Why did he say the circle closes? That’s not what happens at the end of this book. Laura: That’s true. That’s totally true. But it starts with “the circle opens.” That’s the opening. So he has to close it. Sarah: Or is it just that the circle continues? That would have been a more accurate title for this epilogue. Just saying. Laura: I do have to say that I purposely, when I made our reading schedule for The Stand — we knew we wanted to do it for six months, like January to June, which we did — I planned it to close our circle here the same week the book opens, which is the second week of June. Just because I liked that symmetry. Sarah: I love it. I love a symmetry. Laura: We have a few little pages to get through, but before we do that — we will be continuing the slow read. We have picked our next book. Sarah: I picked it and I forced it on Laura. That’s the truth. Laura: We’re going to tell you all about that next week, where you’ll hear the reveal. If you cannot wait another second to find out the book, our paid members learned last week during our book club meeting. So you can go watch the replay of that if you just can’t stand it another second. But today we’re going to tackle “dusk of a summer evening” and the circle closing — which is a lie, because it doesn’t actually close. Sarah: It doesn’t actually close, but there are things to say about how King ended this whole thing. Because if you do any sort of Reddit search, any sort of Googling about The Stand, what people want to talk about is the end. Laura: Pretty much. Whether it was a true stand, or a letdown for some people, or if it’s what people expected. There’s a lot of that. The Split Epilogue: An Epilogue for the Good Guys Sarah: We get this kind of split epilogue, right? So we get “dusk of a summer evening.” The people we get to see from the Free Zone contingent — the good side — are Stu and Franny and Peter. Laura: I’m sorry, three people. Babies are people too. On their journey back to Maine, they stop at Mother Abigail’s house. Sarah: I don’t know if that path makes sense, for the record. Geographically I’m always like, where are you guys going? What are we doing? But whatever, it’s fine. Laura: Maybe there’s something about the way you’d have to travel by foot. I’ve always thought this is weird. I’m going through all this area of the country, including Nebraska, this summer on my RV road trip with my family. So maybe I can report back to us. But they do stop at Mother Abigail’s house. They’re on the porch, the baby’s playing, and they’re talking about what happened in the Free Zone and what they think is going to happen next. It’s a little epilogue for the good guys, really. Did it feel true to you? Sarah: Yeah. I think it’s true that the Free Zone would not stay together as this tight, cohesive unit. As people came together — I love this line — “all these people make me nervous as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.” That’s something my grandpa would say. My grandpa always said, I want to live in the middle of 400 acres with a fence around it that says no trespassing. So to a cert