This month I have slipped in a few new titles but I still have several books I want to read from the September pool so this new list might not be so exciting. As is usually the case, I find myself in the midst of three or four novels just as the month rolls over so, no matter how tempting the new titles are, I really must attend to finishing the old ones first. And this includes a couple of hefty tomes that may take quite some time to complete.

I’m still thrashing between trying to empty some space on my bookshelves by reading real ink and paper books but my iPad is just so convenient that I often start reading a new digital novel immediately after finishing the previous digital novel and never get to those hard-to-read paper things. Even when I schedule a real book to read, I often scurry around and obtain a digital copy beforehand and end up donating the physical book to the local Book Exchange (they love me … lots of essentially brand-new books for their collection).

It has started to cool off a little around here. It’s not that the alligators are forced to wear sweaters but just cool enough so I can sit out on the lanai and read at my leisure. This is a good time of the year.

Here is my reading pool for October 2014

1. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings— Maya Angelou *
2. The Way the World Works — Nicholas Baker *
3. Sellevision — Augustan Burroughs *
4. Cities of the Red Night — William S. Burroughs
5. The Man Who Was Thursday — C. K. Chesterton *
6. Nostromo — Joseph Conrad *
7. Nervous Conditions — Tsitsi Dangarembga
8. The Big Money — John Dos Passos
9. Independence Day — Richard Ford *
10. Two Girls, Fat and Thin — Mary Gaitskill
11. Momo — Romain Gary *
12. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book — Maxine Hong Kingston
13. Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy — John Le Carré *
14. The Interrogation — J. M. G. Le Clézio *
15. California — Edan Lepucki *
16. I Hunt  Killers — Barry Lyga *
17. A Heart So White — Javier Marías *
18. Defiance — Carole Maso
19. Despair — Vladimir Nabokov *
20. Mudwoman — Joyce Carol Oates *
21. Doomed — Chuck Palahniuk *
22. Martereau — Nathalie Sarraute
23. Maigret Meets a Milord — Georges Simenon *
24. Momento Mori — Muriel Spark
25. Snowcrash — Neil Stephenson
26. The Royal Family — William T. Vollmann
27. Armageddon In Retrospect — Kurt Vonnegut
28. Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace
29. Salamander — Thomas Wharton *
30. Black Boy — Richard Wright