Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “occupations from fiction we’d like to try”. I would like to be a member of the Idle Rich, like Bertie Wooster. I feel very strongly I was meant for a life of reading and writing and pondering the Cosmos under trees, but someone made a mistake.

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Human Errors, a bit of biology; an a four-hour adapted audio drama of The Hobbit. A friend of mine reads the Lord of the Rings every autumn (appropriate for a story that ‘begins’ on September 22), and I’m trying to join him in my way. The version I found was on Audible, and it appears to have been adapted for use by NPR. Most of the accents are American, and there’s music included — including dwarvish singing. Smaug talks like he’s drooling, which made the last hour or so unpleasant.

WHAT are you reading now? Into the Planet, a cave-diver’s memoirs which will hopefully have enough science content for me to list it as Geology in the science survey; a radio drama of The Fellowship of the Ring on audiobook; The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression; and Reagan: The Life.

WHAT are you reading next? That question is more “Which of the items you are currently reading are you going to focus on next”, since I’m not particularly locked-in on anything. I’m reading Reagan an hour a day at lunch; Forgotten Man at home; and listening to Fellowship on drives. I’m about to start two weeks of dog-sitting at different houses (October is apparently a nice time for people to travel), so odds are I’ll get a LOT of reading done. Yesterday I stumbled onto a Civil War book that I think — my hand to General Lee — I can list as a PHYSICS TITLE. I should finish Forgotten Man before Friday, but I’m only 250+ pages into Reagan and Brands’ work on him is almost a big a door-stopper as McCullough’s Truman.