With Episode 21 (2.9), we begin the second of the three essays comprising The Maine Woods, "Chesuncook," in which Thoreau navigates from Boston to Bangor, then travels by wagon to the foot of Moosehead Lake, then by canoe to its head, before porting to the Penobscot River. The episode concludes with the second half of Jewett's long ninth chapter, "At Dr. Leslie's."

Episode 16 continues our reading from "Ktaadn." Thoreau's mention of poisoning wolves is the occasion for sharing a Tuckerman sonnet that addresses the topic as well as the 19th-century American poet's well-regarded pastoral ode, "The Cricket." The episode concludes with more of Jewett's A Country Doctor.

Episode 15 picks up where we left off with Thoreau's trek northward toward Mr. Katahdin in The Maine Woods. Then, having so far presented only the short initial chapter of Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor, The Reading Hour forges into the story of young Nan Prince.

In episode 14 (2.2), we begin two longer works related to Maine: Henry David Thoreau's nonfictional account of his adventures in the state, The Maine Woods (1864), and the York County author Sarah Orne Jewett's novel A Country Doctor (1884). Because "Ktaadn," the opening essay of Thoreau's three-part book, quotes from Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," that poem is read aloud in full.

Episode 13 (or season 2, episode 1 = §2.1) introduces Henry David Thoreau's ecological prose to The Reading Hour with the essay "A Winter Walk" (1843) and serves us as a preface to the longer Thoreauvian work to come: The Maine Woods (1864). The hour concludes with two of Thoreau's poems: "Sic Vita" and "Conscience is instinct bred in the house").

Episode 12 concludes our reading of Woolf's To the Lighthouse then presents two short essays that Ralph Waldo Emerson published in The Dial between 1840 and 1844: "The Tragic" and "The Senses and the Soul.".

Episode 11 opens with interpretive remarks about Woolf's project and several of her characters' concerns in To the Lighthouse's final part; chapters 8-11 of "The Lighthouse" are then presented.

Episode 10 departs from The Reading Hour's usual format by beginning with a few short works by the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson, with whom episode 9 had concluded. The Reader Hour then presents chapters 4-7 of To the Lighthouse's third part, "The Lighthouse."