Doctor Sleep Read Along

Doctor Sleep, Stephen King's sequel to The Shining, will be released tomorrow, and starting October 1, Tiff @ Tif Talks Books and Charlene @ Cheap Thrills will be hosting a Read-Along.

If all goes as planned, I'll be participating in Twitter chats (hashtag #sleepalong) and posting updates and answers to discussion questions on the following dates:

Monday, September 30:  Doctor Sleep Read-along Kick-off!

Monday, October 7:  Discussion #1 (approx. pages 1-180)

Monday, October 14:  Discussion #2 (approx. pages 181-360)

Monday, October 21:  Wrap-up Discussion (total 544 pages)

I read The Shining soon after it's publication in 1977, at the age of 16 or 17, and have not reread it since.  A recent interview with with Mr. King, published in The Guardian, included this insight:

King notes with some amusement that he has been around so long that kids who read and loved him in the 1970's now run publishing houses and newspapers; he is revered, these days, as a grand old man of American letters. The experience of reading King young – "Under the covers with a flashlight at summer camp," as he puts it – doesn't leave one, and although he says, casually, that "it's pretty easy to scare a 14-year-old", the pleasures of his books endure.

I don't think the experience of reading King young has left me.  The Shining and Carrie helped shape my reading preferences, but I wonder now what other lasting traces the experience left, so I will be focusing on the experience of reading the sequel in "real time".  In the 36 years since I read The Shining, Danny Torrance and I have aged together.  I've changed, my reading preferences have changed, my perspective has changed.  Will it  still be as easy to scare me?  Will I understand Danny's changes?   I think it will be a fascinating read.  Join me if you dare.