Fish or Cut Bait

I’ve been playing around with book titles that sound good or offer enlightenment or even just promise idle entertainment and, as they say, it’s time to fish or cut bait. I have been cutting and shuffling a lot of literary bait the last couple of weeks and I’m going with the following list of books in my September reading pool. Note that I also have a couple of titles still hanging around in a partially read state: I will continue to list those but will keep them separate from the new reading pool.

There’s a few new titles on this list and I hope to enjoy several of them although September is a bad month usually for reading what with family events like birthdays and pool parties.

But despite the hurdles, here is the reading pool I expect to dive into this month:

Bold=Active, Red=Extended Reads, *=Digital Titles

1. Mansfield Park — Jane Austen *
2. Sunset Park — Paul Auster *
3. The Spider’s House — Paul Bowles *
4. The Place of Dead Roads — William S. Burroughs
5. The Ox-Bow Incident — Walter Van Tilburg Clark
6. The Woman In White — Wilkie Collins
7. Nostromo — Joseph Conrad *
8. The Big Money — John Dos Passos
9. Boswell: A Modern Comedy — Stanley Elkin *
10. Middle C — William H. Gass *
11. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages — Tom Holt
12. Skullcrack City — Jeremy Johnson *
13. Martin Eden — Jack London *
14. Epitaph For a Dead Beat — David Markson *
15. Runaway Horses — Yukio Mishima *
16. The Black Prince — Iris Murdoch *
17. The Bathing Women — Tie Ning *
18. Momento Mori — Muriel Spark
19. The Ogre — Michel Tournier
20. Meatspace — Nikesh Shukla *
21. Venus on the Half-Shell — Kilgore Trout [Philip José Farmer] *
22. Hocus Pocus — Kurt Vonnegut *
23. Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace *
24. This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It — David Wong *
25. Villain: A Novel — Shuichi Yoshida *

The Ambassadors — Henry James *