Summer fantasy surf quest 

In Episode 4 of this is what i do when i should be… we recap skateboard and bike camp, move operations up to the beach, and take a stab at that notorious dragon, Smaug. True to form the conversation allows escape from what we really should be doing, which is reviewing Brian Booker’s outstanding collection of short stories about broken minds and their cure: Are You Here for What I’m Here For? (Bellevue Literary Press, 2016). We should also be out catching as many waves as possible off New Jersey’s Long Beach Island in this week of perfect wind. Appropriately, the sea features prominently in Booker’s work, but the weather’s too hot and the waves too shapely for such a mental exercise.

Instead we riff on The Hobbit and contemplate E.B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan, our audio book selection over the course of two long summer road hauls. It’s been a great season for reading, biking, and surfing—both land and sea.

NB: Between recording and publishing this episode, Vikram found his sea legs and stood up on the old man’s 7’6″.