My free time has been whittled down to next to nothing, but I still, somewhat wistfully, keep a list of books I’d like to read and movies I’d like to watch. In fact, I’ve been fantasizing of a week-long break away from everything and spent reading my way through a shelf of books, catching up on a stack of New Yorker issues, and watching a ton of movies. This is sad, because several years ago, I was reading two books a month. That was when I first to New York, and I was commuting into the city from Westchester. If nothing else, I miss that interminable daily ride on the Metro North for all the reading time it used to afford.

Anyway, what would I read if I had the time? Here’s the list.

• “The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century”
  by Paul Krugman
• “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right”
  by Al Franken
• “Starving to Death on $200 Million”
  by James Ledbetter
• “High and Mighty: SUVs — The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way”
  by Keith Bradsher
• “The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the World-Wide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth”
  by Jeremy Rifkin
• “About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design”
  by Alan Cooper and Robert M. Reimann
• “Nobody’s Perfect: Selected Writings from the New Yorker”
  by Anthony Lane