Welcome to SLOW READ: The Stand (The Author's Note + A Preface in Two Parts) — Slow Read: OUTLANDER

Welcome to Welcome to Slow Read The Stand. We are your hosts Sarah Stewart Holland and Laura Tremaine

This is the inaugural episode of Slow Read The Stand. For this first episode, we just wanted y’all to read the Author’s Note and the Preface in Two Parts. But also, today we wanted to share a little bit about this whole project: why we’re doing a slow read, why we’re doing The Stand, all of it.

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

Sarah: We’re going to deep dive to set us on the right track for reading together for six months. I’m so excited. Have you ever done a slow read before, Laura?

Laura: No. I mean, certainly not like this. In fact, this kind of way of doing a slow read—you introduced it to me. I didn’t even know people were doing it like this. It’s new.

Sarah: Listen, it’s a new thing the Internet has invented. It is a great thing the Internet has invented. I was doing slow reads, I just didn’t know they were called that. Probably four or five years ago, I decided I was going to tackle some classic text over the course of the year. It’s too intimidating to sit down with The Brothers Karamazov and chip away over a month. It’ll just take up all your reading time. And I often read more than one book at a time. So I decided to pick one book and just chip away at it over the course of the year.

I did The Brothers Karamazov, I did Don Quixote, I did Lonesome Dove—though I don’t think that took me a year. But I really wanted to get bigger, longer texts. I believe in a juicy book, a big book.

Laura: Can I just say that I like that you took on that project? One of the things that has really spun me out a little bit about “Bookstagram” or “BookTok” right now is that it is like a race in quantity. How many books can you read a year or a month or a week?

Sarah: Mm-hmm. It’s not that I don’t understand how we got here, and I’m all for people reading a lot of books. But there is something that really appeals to me in an analog way of slowing down and sitting with one work for a long time.

Laura: Exactly. I’m an Enneagram One. I can definitely get in that “let me see how many I can check off my list” mode.

Sarah: Me too. Did you know that I’m an Enneagram One too?

Laura: I did not know that! Whoa. Wait, is this a good thing?

Sarah: I think it is. You told me this book is about good and evil, and Enneagram Ones are all about black and white and seeing the world. So I think it’ll be superpowered.

Laura: But we will not be offering a wider perspective because we’ll be like, “Good and Evil.” If we pick clearly who the good and bad characters are and you don’t agree with us, we’re so sorry. Two against one!

So, I can get in that mindset really easily—let me just get through to the end. Let me complete it. I will gulp down a book. I will read a book and then two years later ask, “Did I read that book?” because I read it so quickly. So I really wanted to work on that aspect of myself with the slow reads.

Sarah: But here’s the thing. I read Brothers Karamazov, I read Don Quixote. Did I get as much out of them as I possibly could just sitting down and reading them by myself? No. Because last year I did Footnotes and Tangents , a really lovely Substack run by Simon Haisell . He does a slow read of War and Peace and a slow read of the Cromwell Trilogy by Hilary Mantel. He advises you not to do both at the same time. Did I take his advice? I did not.

So I did both of them last year. I did War and Peace, which I’d always wanted to read. War and Peace lends itself to this beautifully. You just read a chapter a night and he would do these great histories and accompaniment that really enriched my reading. I felt like I got so much more out of the book.

But I kind of wore myself out on the classics set a long time ago. I’ve been on a run of those and I’m tired. I thought, “Okay, who do I want to read more of who has some long-ass books?” And a little light bulb went off and I went, “Wait, I know Stephen King.” And then I went, “Wait, nobody’s doing this yet. And I know exactly who to ask.”

Laura: Because I am a Stephen King evangelist.

Sarah: I know you are. And I love tha