Episode Details

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)

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If you prefer to read instead of listen, below is a cleaned up transcript of the episode as well as links to all the books and Substacks we mentioned in this episode…and several fun bonus links and videos!

Mentioned in this episode:

* The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

* The Tune of Things: Is Consciousness God? (Christian Wilman in Harper’s, 2025)

* Moby Dick by Herman Melville

* The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

* Paradise Lost by John Milton

* “Top of the World” by The Chicks (Official Video)

* Stand By Me (1986 film) — IMDb

The Writing in This Section

Sarah: Laura, after a very long time in the free zone, we are back with Randall Flagg and his crew, which have been varying levels of infiltrated by the committee spies. How did you feel about this section?

Laura: I thought these particular chapters were some of the best written of the whole entire book. I have two standout sections that I consider the best in terms of incredible sentences and just the craft of it — this is one of them. Not a ton of wild imagination necessarily, but the sentences in this section, I was like, oh, that’s so well written. How he looped back several different things, and then the section many hundreds of pages ago with Glenn Bateman — that one felt really well written too, really poetic. But this section feels different. Like he was in a flow state, Mr. King, when he did this part.

Sarah: I totally agree. I thought it was really engaging. And I also want to say — in this section as a whole, King makes a ton of literary references. He references Edgar Allan Poe, he references Lord of the Rings. I looked up the law book that Judge Ferris is reading, the one King mentions multiple times, and that’s a real book — it’s literally about racial social justice. I looked at it and was like, okay, he is doing some things. King is doing some things. This is pre-B