Snip, Snip, Snip

The landscaping crew picked up all the leaves in the yard the other day. I was resting in bed, listening to Progressive Radio and wondering about deadly viruses crawling on my eyeshade when the ratcheting cacophony of leaf blowers and lawn mowers started the windows to rattle and my teeth to tinkle .. in the jar on the bathroom sink.

Picking up the leaves is a good thing. Otherwise I am forever searching for Ricky’s dog poops which tend to blend into the ground foliage and lay waiting for an innocent foot. But for whatever clichéd reason, I was reminded that my reading pace has been accelerating lately: is it fallen leaves or the blind Fury?

You might have noticed that the last few months’ reading pools have been drained and several additional titles were added to fill in the month, so this month I actually made a list of thirty titles to read, thinking that it would allow for more choice on my part. Then I changed it back to twenty titles with a short supplemental list. And finally I grew the supplemental list to also function as the working list for the upcoming month.

All of this is somewhat wonky: I have a list on my iPad that will probably cover my reading until the end of the year, if not further. As someone said: So many books. So Little time.

But for the March Reading Pool, these are the selected titles. If you’re interested in the Supplemental list, it can be found on the site under Active Reading.

1. Zinky Boys — Svetlana Alexievich
2. Robert B. Parker’s Old Black Magic — Ace Atkins
3. Humbold’s Gift — Saul Bellow
4. The Pilgrim’s Progress — John Bunyan
5. The Ugly American — Eugene Burdick
6. The Shooting Party — Anton Chekhov
7. Bringing Out the Dead — Joe Connelly
8. Go Down, Moses — William Faulkner
9. Me & Mr. Cigar — Gibby Haynes
10. A Single Man— Christopher Isherwood
11. The Portrait of a Lady — Henry James
12. Death Without Company — Craig Johnson
13. The Wanderer — Fritz Leiber
14. The Ordeal of Richard Feveral — George Meredith
15. Contempt — Alberto Moravia
16. The Boy In the Earth — Fuminori Nakamura
17. Mrs. Fletcher — Tom Perrotta
18. 10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World — Elif Shafak
19. December 6 — Martin Cruz Smith
20. The Curse of Lono — Hunter S. Thompson