Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die discussion

What were the best books you read from the list(s) in 2012? The worst?

My favorite list books of 2012 were:
{5 stars}

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Hunger - Knut Hamsun
Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Collector - John Fowles
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier

Honorable mention:
{4 stars}

The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery

And while none of the list books I read were bad (no 1 or 2 star list reads in 2012 -- whoo hoo!!), one book was somewhat disappointing, but still managed a respectable 3-star rating:

The Stranger (The Outsider) - Albert Camus

My favorites for 2012 (rated with either 4.5 or 5 stars...)

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (a re-read)
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
Emma by Jame Austen.

Least favorite list book of the year was definitely
Snow by Orham Pamuk.... I really only read about half... and then skimmed through the remainder after deciding I had enough of it.

I also didn't particularly like The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. I was super disappointed in this one because I read Lessing's debut novel, The Grass is Singing just a couple weeks earlier and thought it was great.

Best books

at swim two birds by flann o'brien

silas marner george elliot

the savage detectives roberto bolano

not my cup of T books

pale fire nabakov-I loved all his other work I just didnt get it

foucaults pendulum umberto eco-a bit long winded and no pay off in the end

Best, all 5 stars for me:

A Fine Balance
Storm of Steel
The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman
Ethan Frome
The Last Chronicle of Barset

Didn't appreciate:

Cranford (1 star)
I'm Not Scared (2 stars)
The Bridge on the Drina (2 stars)
Smilla's Sense of Snow (2 stars)

isnt it funny how for one person a novel can be on their top hated and another person loves it? I have seen Ethan Frome on several most hated lists, same as wuthering heights, but people who liked that novel loved it. It is pretty rare just about everyone loves a novel top down.

The two 5 stars (for me this means grab someone and force them to read the book!!) I read in 2012 were:
American Rust by Philipp Meyer
The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima


However, I would give two authors 5 stars and I am looking forward to reading more of their work:
J.M. Coetzee I gave Disgrace 4 stars
José Saramago I gave 4 stars to Cain

All my List books scored at least 3 stars -- some pushed up a star because they were on the list. :) I liked some books less than others, but my least favorite this year was:
The Book of Evidence by John Banville

2012 highlights for me included:
Titus Groan
Gormenghast
Animal Farm
The Bell Jar
Silas Marner

Less enjoyable for me were:
Clea
Pierre et Jean

Have a great 2013!

Favorites:
Saturday
The Book of Illusions
Get Shorty
The Golden Notebook
The End of the Affair
The Killer Inside Me
Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day

Liked but didn't love:
The Human Stain
Chocky
The Little Prince
A Passage to India

When I checked my ratings of the list reads I was actually surprised to see how many I really enjoyed.

The only 5* for me in 2012 were both RE-reads. I read them so regularly I think I might be biased in my love for them.

I had 23 1st-time list reads in 2012. Of which
8****, 10***, 4**, 1*

The 4s were:
Poisonwood Bible
1Q84 - long, but it REALLY hooked me
Tipping the Velvet
Siddhartha
Schindler's List
Everything is Illuminated - the funnest & funniest of these
Pit & the Pendulum
The Inferno - challenging but good

The 2s were:
Fanny Hill - UGH
Portrait of a Lady
The Purloined Letter (yep Poe got a 4 and a 2)
Slow Man

The 1 was:
The Enormous Room. I tried so hard, but just hated. Sad, I love Cummings poetry.

After looking at all that, it occurred to me to look over my non-list year too. I read 10 off-list, of which
5****, 3***, and 2**.
One of my off-list 4 stars was by a list author, Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

I then felt compelled to calculate average ratings. What a wonk I am.
My off-list average is 3.30.
My list average is 3.08.
Interesting to me that the list did so well. On the other hand though, I think I'm at 139 total. I suspect that some distant day, when I've read half the list, I won't be liking what's left as much.

Charity, this was a great topic. Nice to look back and review the year. And always great to see everyone's experiences. Helps me keep listing...

My favourite half dozen of the year 2012 were (in no particular order):-

Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Money
Written on the Body
A Confederacy of Dunces
Watchmen
A Room with a View

The only one that I seriously disliked in parts was

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

My favorites were:
1.Half of a Yellow Sun
2. Dracula
3. Cloud Atlas
4. Anna Karenina
5. The Call of the Wild
6. A Christmas Carol

My least favorite by leaps and bounds was Moll Flanders.

Looking back over my reading from the 1001 list this past year, I find I was not extremely impressed (*****)
with anything I chose except classics that were actually Re-Reads for me from years earlier! Those include:

Silas Marner _*****
Great Expectations - *****
Moby Dick - ****
Tess of the D'Ubervilles - ****
Lady Chatterley's Lover - ****
The Hound of the Baskervilles - ****
Emma - ****
Cry, The Beloved Country - ****

I re-read four Hemingway's this year and found them all better than I remembered them:
The Old Man and The Sea - *****
The Sun Also Rises - ****
For Whom the Bell Tolls - ***
To Have and To Have Not - **

Rather than go by my original ratings of the NEW novels I read (since most all were **** and ***), I've chosen my favorites from those that are most memorable after the year has passed. Those are:
The Pigeon ****
American Rust - ****
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - ****
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - ***
Libra- ****
A Kestral for a Knave - *****
Under the Skin - ****
The Lover - ****
Notes From Underground - ****
The Voyage Out-****
The Master and Margarita - ****
The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin- ****
Castle Richmond - ****
Billiards at Half-Past Nine - ****
Cold Comfort Farm - ****

The remainder of the 72 I read this year fall in the *** range. In retrospect, 2012 was not my best year for choosing from the list; but a great one for re-reads!

5 stars:
The Scarlet Letter
Crime and Punishment (technically a re-read)
The Metamorphosis

4 stars:
Enduring Love
Lolita
Sophie's Choice
Madame Bovary
The Street of Crocodiles and other stories
At the Mountains of Madness

Books I didn't care for (2 stars--no 1 stars this year!)
The English Patient
Wise Blood

My tops for the year were also re-reads - except for one book out of the Forsyte Saga.... I'm a bit disappointed in the amount I read this year - having a toddler sure put a cramp in the amount of reading I could tackle. =)

5s - Les Mis (love this one),
4s - All Quiet on the Western Front, In Chancery

2s - Quiet American, Man of Property, Indian Summer, Brideshead Revisited.

I am almost finished with the entire Forsyte Saga... The last book will fall as wrapped up in 2013. Probably good, since I found the first book the most difficult to enjoy (2 stars) and the star level has increased as I go through the remaining books.

Wayne wrote: "I would say my favourites for 2012 were:

5. The Life and Opini..."

Glad you liked it - I did too! Fun in lots of places. You might like The Unfortunate Traveler, which I think is still on the list (I'm doing the 2010 ed).

My favorite reads of 2012 were:
1) Don Quijote
2) Three Musketeers
3) Brideshead Revisited
4) Umberto Eco's "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana"
and I have to say that Dumas' "The Black Rose" though typically simple and formulaic had a lot appeal too.
Didn't really have any clunkers this year.

I mostly read non-fiction, so I only read nine new books off the list this year.

My favorite was I know why the caged bird sings, by Maya Angelou (probably not surprising since i like non-fiction). It is a really well-written memoir that draws you into her life growing up in the South in the 1930s.

My least favorite was The Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector. I had higher hopes for this one, given the reviews, but I didn't really like any of the characters or the way the book was written. I like longer novels where you get to know the characters better, and this one was really short, had a really abrupt ending, and I never really got into it.

Best:
Jung Chang- Wild Swans
Wilkie Collins- The Woman in white
Jane Austen- Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen- Sense and sensibility
Julian Barnes- The Sense of an ending
Ian Fleming- Casino Royale
Arthur Golden- Memoirs of a Geisha
Kazuo Ishiguro- Remains of the day
Yann Martel- Life of Pi
Michael Ondaatje- The English Patient
John Steinbeck- The Grapes of Wrath
Arthur Conan Doyle- The Hound of the baskervilles
John Buchan- The 39 Steps

Worst:
Garcia Marquez Gabriel- One Hundred years of solitude
Kiran Desai- The inheritance of loss
Jack Kerouac- On the road
Graham Greene- The Heart of the matter

Looking back over 2013 it was a very interesting book year. Lots of high’s and lows. For 2012 overview I posted as WORST my 2 and 1*, and as BEST my 4 and 5*. Well, that’s just too many books this year (13 and 20). So I thought I’d whittle it down the titles that still leave a gut impression. That was easy to do with the worst (I don’t feel too much animosity towards most of them). But on the BEST side I still have warm feelings for most of these, so they are all below.

WORST
Choke - Palahniuk
Tono-Bungay- H.G. Wells
Money: A Suicide Note- Martin Amis
London Fields - Martin Amis

BEST
Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
Gaskell - Mary Barton
Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities
Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
Banks - The Player of Games
Banks - The Crow Road
Banks - Complicity
Hemingway- For Whom the Bell Tolls
Hemingway- The Sun Also Rises
Orwell - Coming Up For Air
Orwell - Burmese Days
Collins - The Moonstone
Collins - The Woman In White
Wharton - House of Mirth
Wharton - The Age of Innocence
Bronte - The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Atwood - The Robber Bride

BEST OF THE BEST (Warmest lingering feelings)
O’Brien -The Things They Carried
Murakami - Kafka on the Shore
Eliot -Silas Marner

In 2013 I read quite a number of 5-star books. There were also some pleasant surprises, but also some surprises on the negative side.

WORST:
Veronica decides to die by Paulo Coelho
A Gate at the stairs by Lorrie Moore
Fear and Loathing in las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
The Accidental by Ali Smith

The one novel I probably was most disappointed in this year was Cloud Atlas. I had heard so much praise for it but I only found it very mediocre.

BEST:
The Club Dumas by Arturo Peréz Reverte
Chess Story by Stephan Zweig
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1984 by George Orwell
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Embers by Sandor Marai
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

PLEASANT SURPRISES:
There but for the by Ali Smith
The Devil in the Flesh by Raimond Radiguet
The Left-Handed Woman by Peter Handke

All in all a very mixed year with lots of ups but also a few downs.

Interesting that Ali Smith had both a best and a worst for you. I agree that Thr Accidental and A Gate at the Stairs were among the worst I read this year.

My best books are:

My favorites were The Children's Book, The Satanic Verses, and Rebecca.

My dislikes were The White Tiger, Moll Flanders, and The Club Dumas.

My five star books this year were Ragtime by E.L Doctorow, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, and The History of Love by Nicole Krauss.

My one star books were White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, Kieran Smith, Boy by James Kerman and The Children's Book by AS.S. Bhatt.

Andrea wrote: "My five star books this year were Ragtime by E.L Doctorow, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, and The History of Love by Nicole Krauss.

My one star books were White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, Kieran Smith,..."

Couldnt agree more Byatt is so over rated in my judgement, the childrens book and possession and a virgin in the garden are all so long and boring and cliche and boring. And Franzen is the opposite!

The best from the '1001 list' that I read for the first time in 2013 was 2666 Part B by Roberto Bolaño.

It is a landscape of surreal and violent imagery.

Like all Bolaño works, familiarity with SA politics and history mixed in with more than a sprinkling of Spanish poetry is of great help when reading his captivating works.

CD wrote: "The best from the '1001 list' that I read for the first time in 2013 was 2666 Part B by Roberto Bolaño.

It is a landscape of surreal and violent imagery.

Like all B..."

My favourite list book this year was The Savage Detectives! I'm really looking forward to 2666 even though I think it'll take me a long time to read :).

Worst book for me was Midaq Alley, really boring and just as it was beginning to get interesting it ended.

List books I enjoyed most this year: Jacques the Fatalist, The Diary of a Nobody, Treasure Island and Tirant Lo Blanc.

List books I enjoyed least: Gargantua and Pantagruel and Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit.

Several 5-star reads in 2013, but my three favorites were Sentimental Education, Crime and Punishment, and for the third a toss up between The Diviners, Cigarettes, and The Old Wives' Tale.

Books I wish I'd skipped are Snow, Tono-Bungay, and Complicity.

I love Byatt :( LOL

Tasha wrote: "I love Byatt :( LOL"

Me too. Each to their own, I guess.

As for my best and worst of 2013:

BEST (5/4 stars):
The Master and Margarita
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Pride and Prejudice
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
L'affaire Toulaév (The Case of Comrade Tulayev)

WORST (2 Stars):
London Fields
Wise Blood
Madame Bovary
The White Tiger
Nemesis

well I also really enjoyed Ivan denisovich and the windup bird but wise blood I also really liked? I was hoping I'd like London fields I really like money?

It depends on how a book hits you!

My list favorites this year (5-star):
The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose
The Nose

And the worst (2-star):
The Purloined Letter
The House on the Borderland
Blindness
Adjunct: An Undigest