I walk every day for about 40 minutes, and the only way I can tolerate the prosaic stroll (four times) around the park next to my house is by listening to words on my iPod. I don’t listen to music. I do that enough during the workday and have grown tired of it by 6pm. But podcasts. Podcasts keep me going. So my question to you is, What podcasts do you regularly hear? I tried sermons, which I thought sounded like the Christian thing to do, but I just couldn’t abide a sermon every day. It was brain-numbing and now I know why we’re only commanded to have corporate worship once a week. You may feel otherwise. I have many friends and relatives who regularly listen to sermons in the car, etc. I might be able to abide some sort of discussion of theology, if you have any suggestions, but the epideictic nature of a sermon is best experienced live.

Anyhow, what I listen to are these podcasts: The Fiction Podcast from The New Yorker, The Fresh Air Podcast from NPR, The This American Life Podcast, and The “Between the Covers” Podcast from National Review. I occassionally listen to the short podcasts from Slate. I discovered all these by navigating the startlingly user-unfriendly world of iTunes. I’d love to get suggestions from you all about what I should be searching for next on iTunes. And also: can you point the rest of us to any useful podcast directories? This is the “Books” post for today, so let’s keep these suggestions focused on podcasts of people talking, rather than people singing.