Best and worst 1001 books read in 2012?

This is such a big list that I'm always looking for ways to focus my reading from it. Anyone care to share your favorite and least favorite books off the list that you read in 2012?

I always find this question fun. I only read 14 books from the list this year due to other priorities, and now that I look at it, I'm not all that excited about the books I read.

The only one I can say I really loved was The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton. I also enjoyed The White Tiger and The Red Queen quite a lot--the later I think because I'd heard it was dreadful and then it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected.

On the other end of things, I tried for perhaps my ninth time to read Cry, the Beloved Country and gave up forever on page 124. I just couldn't stand his writing style and was appalled at the narrator's arrogant attitude. I know everyone else loves this one, and I'm alone in my dislike of it. The other one that did nothing for me was The Third Man, which is not anyone's idea of Graham Greene's best work.

The others were all pretty good, but not anything I particularly want to point out.

I rated two 1,001 books with five stars this year... The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (which was so good I plan to read the rest of the 'Ripliad') and Jane Eyre (which is one of my most read books.)

Other books I really enjoyed this year were The Sea, The Sea, Memories of Rain, Mysteries of Udolpho, The River Between and The Grass is Singing.

I'm glad I read The Grass is Singing because I really didn't like another by Doris Lessing... The Golden Notebook. I made it through TGN, but it took me ages.

The book I liked the least this year was Snow... I read about 2/3 of it and then called it quits (just skimming my way to the end.) I found the writing really clunky and felt the story just kept circling round and round without getting anywhere. I was really disappointed because I thought this was going to be a good fit for me.

The best book that I read was Wolf Hall. It didn't make the new 1001 list but I live in certainty that it will be in the next edition, now that its sequel has ALSO been awarded a Booker. Seriously, what were the 1001 editors thinking??
Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of those things I would not have read myself but turned out to merit five stars. One Hundred Years of Solitude was a marvel.

Worst books: Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays and Bret Easton Ellis, Less than Zero. The latter book's view of teen-aged depravity really messed with my mind. I'm trying hard to forget it. There were quite a few other books that I could have lived without reading, like Siddhartha and Euphues, but they were not actively brain-damaging.

The best I read was Middlesex, followed closely by Bleak House and Anna Karenina. My least favourite was House of Mirth and, if Wolf Hall had been on the list it would probably have been dead last. I know lots of people really liked Wolf Hall but if it hadn't been for book club I would not have finished it.

I read 28 books off the list this year and really enjoyed most of them. Some stand outs were:

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexndre Dumas
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Laclos

My least favorite were
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
Villette by Charlotte Bronte

All of my least favorites I thought had some merit, they just weren't my kind of book in the case of the first two. Villette I just had very high expectations for since I generally love the Brontes, and I wasn't impressed.

I read 48 books from the list.
Favorites were
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Ragtime by E.L.Doctorow
Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
House of Mirth by Wharton
Day of the Triffids John Wyndham
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Murial Sparks
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Shipping News by Anne Proulx

My least favorite
Blue of Noon by Georges Baitalle
Amateurs by Donald Barthelme

2012 brought me some exceptionally great reads, but also the worst 1,001 read ever.

Best:
- Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann
- Cannery Row and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Patterns of Childhood by Christa Wolf
- The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
- and yes, reading Clarissa by Samuel Richardson was a great experience

Worst:
- Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
- The Once and Future King by T.H. White (some books were okay, but overall I didn't like the series much)
- Memoirs of my nervous illness by Daniel Paul Schreber - so far my worst 1,001

Five star reads this year:

Auto da fe - Elias Canetti
For Whom the Bells Toll - Ernest Hemingway
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
The Untouchable - John Banville, and
The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton

All books that make the trawl through the 1001 List a worthwhile investment

At the bottom of the list Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker and Crash by JG Ballard, both violent pornographic nonsense.

I also started and failed to finish Albert Camus' The Rebel: An Essay which I'm sure might be a fine piece of work if you're in to a uni philosophy thesis, but after 40 pages (and a despairing flick through the rest of the book) I decided it had zero entertainment value for me.

It would be interesting to see how all of this works out. Hmmmm. . .may do a spread sheet some day.

Anyway, here are the ones I really liked and really hated.

THE BEST

5 Stars

A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
Villette - Charlotte Brontë

4.5 Stars

The Yellow Wall Paper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee
Cloudsplitter - Russell Banks
Testament of Youth - Vera Brittain

THE WORST

2 Stars

The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Jealousy - Alain Robbe-Grillet
The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing
Snow - Orhan Pamuk

1 Star

The Beautiful Room is Empty - Edmund White - Is there no depth to which some men will not go to degrade themselves? I could not finish this one. It was just so disgusting.

Maybe some sort of line graph... ;)

#4 Oh my word I'd forgotten about Play it as it Lays - or maybe I just repressed it? Awful, awful book.

I'm just looking at my list and realising that I read some really BRILLIANT stuff this year (for my tastes anyway!) - highlights are The Collector, The Player of Games, The Summer Book, The Colour Purple, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Tipping the Velvet - and of course the amazing and brilliant The Moonstone.

Clarissa has to get a nod for it's overall impact on the year as well.

Not so goods included Play it as it lays which is dreadful, Erewhon which is dull and Solaris which was beyond dull.

Nice question!

The best for me this year were:
Chess: Loved this novelle about the chess player and the story teller
Ethan Frome: another Wharton I loved
Eline Vere: About a woman, getting bored and depressed of society life in The Hague
War and peace: Finally read and worth every of the many pages

The worst:
Huckleberry Finn which I didn't even finish...
Ferdydurke for which I am probably too stupid :-)

I read and liked Middlemarch, Bleak House, and The Tin Drum this year - unfortunately a lot of my reads have been non-1001. I am finishing the year with The Age of Innocence - which is GORGEOUS and likely to make my top 10 of the year.

(Oh, and Wolf Hall's mediocre - good call 1001 editors leaving that one out.)

I didn't read many 1001 books this year.

I really liked:

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (a re-read)
The Hobbit (another re-read, but read aloud to Mr Bear this time!)
The Thin Man
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - how can I have gone so long without reading le Carre??
Cannery Row

Journey to the Centre of the Earth was a bit plodding. There are only so many pages about walking through tunnels under the earth that one can read.

And Grapes of Wrath was a harder read now than when I was a teenager. Felt more like propaganda, and less like literature.

Of 18 books read this year, favorites are probably Flaubert's Parrot and A Christmas Carol, while I got very little out of Heart of Darkness and The Immoralist.

>14 wookiebender: The Smiley books are the best. He's one of my favorite characters ever.

My favorites for the year:
Deep River by Shusaku Endo
Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally

Least favorites (and these weren't just "meh" books. I actively hate all of them and one made it into my top 5 least favorites of all time)
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

Really? I loved The Wasp Factory. But then I hated Tinker, Tailor so I'm thinking we have some different tastes :)

Out of 24 books read this year (plus another one in progress), my favorites are Cloud Atlas and Out of Africa. In Cloud Atlas, each embedded stories was strong and their style was spot on. The language in Out of Africa was so beautiful, I did not want the book to end.

Otoh, I could not finish Small Island and On Beauty, but it might have been wrong timing. I'm willing to try them again in a couple of years.

My 5-star books from the list in 2012 in rough order of preference:

1. Outlaws of the Marsh by Shi Nai'An
2. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
3. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
4. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
5. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
6. Journey to the West by Wu Ch'eng-en

I didn't have any that I rated lower than 3 stars, so it would be misleading to call any of them a "least favorite."

My favourite was What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt I had several books I didn't get on with this year but one I abandoned quickly was The Day of the Dolphin beach read trash IMO.

I read 6 books from the 1001 in 2012, and this is how I rated them:
1. A Confederacy of Dunces, 3. 5 stars
2. Ethan Frome, 5 stars
3. Fear of Flying, 3 stars
4. A Pale View of Hills, 3 stars
5. Shikasta, 4 stars
6. 2666, 3.5 stars

Stand outs for this year:
Alias Grace
Veronika Decides to Die
Catch-22
The Handmaid's Tale
The New York Trilogy

Disappointments:
The Rainbow
The Thirty-Nine Steps
Before Night Falls
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Naked Lunch

I happen to really like Play It As It Lays.

Hey! george1295! I hated The Turn of the Screw too! That was the literary equivalent of beating myself in the head with a brick.

Best: Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller

Worst: The Turn of the Screw - Henry James

Most Difficult (but worthwhile): The Story of O - Pauline Reage

Most Ridiculous/Amusing : Story of the Eye - Georges Bataille

Of course the best book of the whole year wasn't on the list. It was Celebration by Harry Crews. Absolutely amazing. Not a single one of his in any of the Boxall books. This is a crime.

Well, I only started on the list in November, so naturally I've been reading a lot of the books I was already confident I'd like.

I didn't read any 5 star books (but I reserve this rating for only the best!) but I did particularly enjoy:

Life of Pi
Rebecca
Memoirs of a Geisha
Diary of a Nobody

The only book I have a negative review for was Pilgrim's Progress but I think this might be a Marmite of a book.

A friend told me that Pilgrim's Progress was a total must-read if I wanted to understand western culture.
Not sure my desire to understand western culture is that pressing...

#25 Hahahahaha. That is just hillarious! Thanks for a good laugh.

Ugh, I'm slogging my way through Pilgrim's Progress as I write this. Just started the second half and 'praying' it will be over soon. ;)

Pilgrim's Progress is one of my longest owned and unread books. No promises to get to it this year!

#27, please let us know if you understand western culture when you're finished!

Pilgrim's Progress helped me very much to understand what's wrong with western culture: That's it's too much influenced by priggish, dogmatic, sanctimonious works like Pilgrim's Progress.

#3 @amerynth, #10 @george1295 - Thank you both so much for making me feel better about The Golden Notebook. It's one of those books I've always felt guilty about not liking so it's really good to know I'm not alone. No guilt whatsoever about disliking Wolf Hall and everything else by Hilary Mantel though.

Interesting that so many people don't like Hilary Mantel. I had read two previous books by her, Fludd and The Giant, O'Brien, and liked them both; but then I looked for more things by her to read and nothing looked very appealing.
I still stand by Wolf Hall as being a work of genius but 1) I listened to it very well read on audiobooks, where the infamous pronoun problem simply wasn't a problem for some reason, and 2) I actually work on the Tudors, as a scholar, so the large cast of characters was at least somewhat familiar to me. Normally I hate fiction about my period and this one I LOVED because it felt amazingly, incredibly right. But possibly that very rightness is what is off-putting to some regular readers.

I loved Wolf Hall and I'm hoping to recieve Bringing Up the Bodies for Christmas, I've never read any of her other stuff.

Count me in as a Wolf Hall fan, and as someone wh couldn't get through The Golden Notebook.

I received Wolf Hall as a birthday present this year, and despite the varying opinions (or perhaps because of them), I'm looking forward to reading it in the new year.

Wolf Hall ain't bad, but it's nothing I'd tell people they need to read.

Sigh - I'm about a third of the way through The Golden Notebook but sheesh it's a struggle. Ah well - will just keep plodding along a bit at a time I guess!

From the 1001 list, my favorite of the year by far was Sometimes a Great Notion. Why don't people talk about this book more?! I've gone my whole life just knowing it as "that other book by Ken Kesey."

My least favorite was Jacob's Room.

Only one book this year received my highest rating of "superb" and was inducted into Arukiyomi's Hall of Fame: Of Human Bondage.

By a long long way, the worst book this year was thanks to this group: The Mysteries of Udolpho

Arukiyomi: I can understand your reaction to The Mysteries of Udolpho. It's got just about everything wrong with it: turgid, repetitive, overlong, simpering, and making no sort of dramatic sense. Personally, I still loved it, though I couldn't say why.

I read some gothic stinkers in 2012: Dracula I found very, very tedious; Vathek and The Castle of Otranto were bonkers, and not in a good way.

On the other hand, I enjoyed Diderot's The Nun and my surprise highlight has been Buddenbrooks.

I was really looking forward to the three books I ended up hating. In prospect, they ticked all the right boxes. Whereas Buddenbrooks was started in a spirit of 'well, it's about time I tackled some Thomas Mann', and family histories are certainly not my thing at all.

Part of the joyous unpredictability of reading, I guess.

I have 27 on the List for this year.

STAND OUTS
The Master and Margarita
Memoirs of a Geisha
The Age of Innocence
The Count of Monte Cristo
Life of Pi
Vanity Fair

DISAPPOINTMENTS
White Teeth really liked the first part but the second just umhp....
Lolita Needed a long hot shower to feel clean again.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Heard alot of good reviews on this, but just reading it I was a nervous wreck.

>39 arukiyomi: Of Human Bondage is absolutely fantastic!

yep. I vowed to re-read it every decade and also to buy a copy for every child in my family for their 20th birthday so that they can do the same.