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

Share your LIST BOOKS year in review!

Which list books did you love? Which list books did you despise?

HAPPY READING IN 2015!

My BEST (4 or 5 star) list reads this year were:
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
The Kreutzer Sonata - Leo Tolstoy
Nicholas Nickleby - Charles Dickens
Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence
Chocky - John Wyndham
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle (reread)
The Hours - Michael Cunningham

My WORST (1 or 2 star) list read this year was:
The Ravishing of Lol Stein - Marguerite Duras
Less Than Zero - Bret Easton Ellis
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

My OKAY (3 star) list reads this year were:
Casino Royale - Ian Fleming
Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
Franny and Zooey - J. D. Salinger
The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
The Last September - Elizabeth Bowen
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle

My BEST (4 or 5 stars by order of date read, not necessarily by rating)

Billy Bathgate - E.L Doctorow
Troubles - J.G. Farrell
Waterland - Graham Swift
La Bête humaine - Emile Zola
Chess Story - Stefan Zweig
Regeneration - Pat Barker
Germinal - Emile Zola
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Fifth Business - Robertson Davies
The Untouchable - John Banville
Adam Bede - George Eliot

Note: I gave 5 stars to the first of the series A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement, and hope to finish in 2015.

My WORST (2 stars, I managed to not rate any 1 star)

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
The Cider House Rules - John Irving

My OKAY list (3 stars)

The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
A World of Love - Elizabeth Bowen

My BEST (4 or 5 stars):

White Teeth - Zadie Smith
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: Written by Himself - Olaudah Equiano
Evelina - Fanny Burney
Amadis of Gaul
Cecilia - Fanny Burney
Simplicissimus - Grimmelshausen
Last Days of Mankind - Karl Kraus
Camilla - Fanny Burney
Watchmen - Alan Moore
Empire of the Sun - J.G. Ballard
Land - Park
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

My WORST:

Everything Is Illuminated- Foer
Closely Watched Trains - Bohumil Hrabal
The Body Artist - Don DeLillo
A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway
The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan
Hawksmoor - Peter Ackroyd
Dead Babies - Martin Amis
The Child in Time - Ian McEwan

My OKAY list, or books that weren't bad but I didn't care about:

The Left-Handed Woman - Handke
Rashomon
La dama número trece - Somoza
All Souls - Javier Marías
them - Joyce Carol Oates
The Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway
Democracy - Joan Didion
Humboldt's Gift - Saul Bellow
Time's Arrow - Martin Amis
Flaubert's Parrot - Julian Barnes
Dangling Man - Saul Bellow
Black Dogs - Ian McEwan
The Book of Evidence - John Banville
The Buddha of Suburbia - Hanif Kureishi

So that makes 34 list books read in 2014.

I just started the List this month, but so far

My BEST:

The Killer Inside Me
Casino Royale

My WORST (DNF)

Pnin
A Tale of a Tub

My BEST (4-5 stars):

Aesop's Fables - Aesop
The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter - Anonymous
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
The Nose - Nikolay Gogol
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell
The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day - Winifred Watson
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Wonderful O - James Thurber

My WORST (1-2 stars):

Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There - Lewis Carroll
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Thin Man - Dashiell Hammett
The Third Man - Graham Greene (the movie is amazing though!)
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke

My OKAY (3 stars):

Amadis of Gaul: A Novel of Chivalry of the 14th Century Vol. I & II - Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo
Candide - Voltaire
King Solomon's Mines - H. Rider Haggard
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
Thank You, Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I, Robot - Isaac Asimov
Amsterdam - Ian McEwan
Measuring the World - Daniel Kehlman

33 books in total. I thought I'd only read 16 this year, but turns out I'd only read that much before this year, so that was a nice surprise :)

My 5 Stars:
The Catcher in the Rye
Animal Farm
The Awakening
The Yellow Wallpaper

My 4 Stars:
Of Mice and Men
The Great Gatsby

My 3 Stars:
The Old Man and the Sea

I have read 17 list-books in 2014:
Best:
To Kill a Mockingbird
Siddhartha
Aesop's Fables

Worst:
The Left-Handed Woman

This is my first full year trying to read from the 1001 list, and I read 13. I try to stick with the Goodreads ratings, so although I gave two books two stars - those were still OK reads for me. I didn't read any that I truly did not like, so no one star ratings. It's interesting to go back and look at what I rated each book at the time. I have the inclination to downgrade a couple of the books, now that I look at the list (specifically Lord of the Flies down to 3 stars and Things Fall apart down to 2 stars).

5 stars - it was amazing
Bleak House
Les Misérables
The Once and Future King

4 stars - really liked it
The Sense of an Ending
Lord of the Flies
Don Quixote
Daniel Deronda
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

3 stars - liked it
The Cement Garden
Things Fall Apart

2 stars - it was ok
Mrs. Dalloway
The Golden Ass

**edited post to add a couple of books I didn't initially see on my bookshelf for 2014**

Best ones:

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Persuasion
Life of Pi

Worst:

Middlesex
Mansfield Park
Invisible Cities
The White Tiger

Best Books:
To kill a mockingbird
The turn of the screw
Never let me go
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Emma

Worst Books:
Things fall apart
Wuthering Heights
The catcher in the rye

I've only been actively trying to read the 1001 books for the past couple of months but this year included:

5 stars:
Catch 22- Joseph Heller
Slaughterhouse 5- Kurt Vonnegut

4 stars:
Heart of Darkness- Joseph Conrad
Great Expectations- Charles Dickens
The Time Machine- H G Wells

3 stars:
The Curious Incident of The Dog In the Night- Mark Haddon
The 39 Steps- John Buchan
Casino Royale- Ian Fleming
Cats Cradle- Kurt Vonnegut

2 Stars:
Crome Yellow- Aldous Huxley
Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas- Hunter S Thompson

Pretty much all 20th century and all male authors (too my shame!) so need to start reading a few more female writers this year I feel.

5*
Anna Karenina
Clear Light of Day
The Poisonwood Bible
All Quiet on the Western Front

4*
Breakfast at Tiffany's
A Town Like Alice
In the First Circle
Middlesex
Madame Bovary
Their Eyes Were Watching God

3*
Rebecca
The Unconsoled
The Sea
Like Water for Chocolate

Nothing less than 3* for me, so I am encouraged to keep working on the list.

My Best list reads of the year:

A Fine Balance
White Teeth
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
The Talented Mr. Ripley
The Nose
Casino Royale
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
The Sense of an Ending
Thérèse Raquin
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Carry Me Down
Freedom
Nights at the Circus
American Pastoral
Time's Arrow
The Human Stain
There but for the
The Things They Carried
Cutter and Bone
The Color Purple
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Solaris
The Temple Of My Familiar
The Midwich Cuckoos
Chocky
The Good Soldier
Middlesex
The Black Dahlia
Faceless Killers
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Possessing the Secret of Joy
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Postman Always Rings Twice
I, Robot
Farewell, My Lovely
Foundation
The Secret History
The War of the Worlds
Around the World in Eighty Days
The Death of Ivan Ilych
The Third Man
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The Siege of Krishnapur
Native Son
Neuromancer
A Tale of Two Cities
Treasure Island
Chess Story
Amok
The Three Musketeers
Rabbit, Run
Rabbit Redux
Rabbit Is Rich
Red Harvest
The Glass Key
City Primeval
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
Enduring Love
The Cement Garden
The Gathering
The Master
The Marriage Plot
Amsterdam
Mrs. Dalloway
The Hours
Independent People
Kitchen
War and Peace
No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories
Timbuktu


My Worst list read of the year:

Blood and Guts in High School

My Okay list reads of the year:

Lady Chatterley's Lover
Watchmen
The Violent Bear it Away
Stranger in a Strange Land
Zorba the Greek
The Radetzky March
The House of Doctor Dee
The 39 Steps
Robinson Crusoe
Herzog
The Glass Bees
The Wild Boys
Dead Souls

Overall, it was a pretty good year. :)

Some really pleasant surprises in my favourite books of the year:
The Art of Fielding, The Third Policeman and Troubles were all better than expected.
Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Plot Against America were every bit as good as I had hoped.
All were knocked into the also-ran department by the sublime A Dance to the Music of Time.

As much as I like Walter Scott, I found The Monastery to be no better than ordinary. Stranger in a Strange Land was over-long, overblown and over-rated. Celestial Harmonies appeared to me to be just self-indulgent twaddle. If that is the best literature Hungary can offer, I'll strike Budapest off my list of potential holiday destinations for 2015.

2014 was a very mixed year. I read ca. 90 books from the list. There were some pleasant surprises but also quite a few negative experiences.

My WORST:
Miss Lonelyhearts
Adjunct: An Undigest
Seize the Day
Reasons to Live
On the Heights of Despair

My HIGHLIGHTS:
Emma
Homo Faber
Steppenwolf
The Blind Assassin
All Quiet on the Western Front
1Q84
The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights

My PLEASANT SURPRISES:
One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand
Mrs. Dalloway
Story of the Eye
Exercises in Style
Cold Comfort Farm
Forever a Stranger and Other Stories
Ragtime

BEST:
The Color Purple
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
The War of the Worlds
Silas Marner
A Christmas Carol
The Hours/Mrs. Dalloway
The Bell Jar
The Picture of Dorian Gray

OKAY:
The History of Love
Interview with the Vampire (The Vampire Chronicles, #1)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Fingersmith
White Teeth
Nights at the Circus

WORST:
On the Road
The Wild Boys

This has given me a good idea of what to bump up a bit this year to keep me going!