I noticed this year that I tend to look in places other than my annual reading pool for new books to read. If you are sharp you might suspect that the total number of unread books in the reading pool doesn’t significantly go down during the year, even though I am reading a significant number of books. Well, the pool might not be so useful during the year but it does put a lot of authors and titles into my head that surprisingly pop up as if by magic when I’m thinking about something to read.

The monthly reading pools are another question. True, I often read titles that are outside of those listed, especially after a trip to the library, but the majority of books I read each month do come from the list.

So this is the last list for 2014: the Reading Pool for December. I traditionally reserve December for catching up on a lot of those titles I haven’t gotten to or, if I’ve read a healthy stack of books I can spend the month struggling through a couple of the big books that tend to scare me away during the earlier months. This year I’m going for a more typical reading list involving several old titles that I keep skipping and several new titles that may pique my interest and streamline my reading.

So this is my December reading pool and perhaps you too will see a book or two you want to read during the month:

1. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings— Maya Angelou *
2. The Green Man — Kingsley Amis *
3. Such — Christine Brooke-Rose
4. The Big Money — John Dos Passos
5. A Bad Man — Stanley Elkin *
6. The Mansion — William Faulkner
7. Independence Day — Richard Ford *
8. The French Lieutenant’s Woman — John Fowles *
9. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book — Maxine Hong Kingston
10. The Interrogation — J. M. G. Le Clézio *
11. Middle C — William H. Gass *
12. A Pair of Blue Eyes — Thomas Hardy *
13. The Old Capital — Yasunari Kawabata
14. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History — Elizabeth Kolbert *
15. The Drop — Dennis Lehane *
16. California — Edan Lepucki *
17. A Heart So White — Javier Marías *
18. Epitaph For a Dead Beat — David Markson *
19. Defiance — Carole Maso
20. Zombies and Shit — Carlton Mellick III
21. Despair — Vladimir Nabokov *
22. The Dalkey Archive — Flann O’Brien
23. Revenge — Yoko Ogawa *
24. Doomed — Chuck Palahniuk *
25. Martereau — Nathalie Sarraute
26. The Room — Hubert Selby Jr *
27. The Book of Other People — Zadie Smith *
28. Snow Crash — Neil Stephenson
29. Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace
30. Salamander — Thomas Wharton *