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 *