Favorites and Least Favorites from 2014?

Hi everyone! I'm always curious at this time of year to see a list of favorite and least favorite books that you read from the 1001 books list this year. It's been a good way for me to prioritize my reading from the list. I also love seeing how sometimes one book can make both lists depending on the reader.

Please share your bests and worsts of 2014!

I read a few real duds this year. Vernon God Little has to be one of the worst books I have ever read, much less from the 1001 list. Do not waste part of your life, however small a part, reading this. Also pretty bad were Albert Angelo, Falling Man, I Thought of Daisy, and Self Condemned. Nor did I care for The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao or Bellow's Herzog.

Alberta and Jacob was a book that I didn't rate that highly yet it left an enduring impression and I keep thinking back to it. I may have to change its rating. Billy Liar was another of the same quality. I learned a lot from Ashes and Diamonds and was fascinated by No Laughing Matter. Discovering Samuel Beckett was a great part of this year's reading and I highly recommend Molloy and Watt in particular.

All the books in that last paragraph I read for the Group Challenge. From that same list of books nobody in the group had read, I made other great discoveries -- Slauerhoff's The Forbidden Kingdom, Alfredo Bryce Echenique's A World for Julius, and the amazing The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. All three of these were completely marvelous. Bowen's To the North from that list was also outstanding but I expected that, having read books by her before. At the other extreme, I read some famous classics that were totally worthy of their fame: Madame Bovary and Ulysses and Kafka's The Trial.

Our group reads of The Radetzky March and Testament of Youth were both thought-provoking, memorable, and apt for the sad anniversary of World War I.

Thanks to everybody for sharing a year of excellent reading!

A Ghost at Noon was probably the most annoying book for this year, whatever virtues it had were lost to me or in time. Pick it up when you are in the mood for obsessive whining.

I was also not wowed by The Last World or As a Man Grows Older but can see some good points in them...

The top three were all by writers I had no previous experience. Brave New World was the classic that was completely worth the praise, Life & Times of Michael K was a pleasant surprise since I had somehow evpected Coetzee to be really dreary but he was not, and The Engineer of Human Souls was something I had never heard about outside 1001 list...

Here is what I read in 2014:

Dangerous Liaisons
Wild Harbour
Fingersmith
Life of Pi
Country Girls
Chocky
Written on the Body
Mill on the Floss
The Leopard
Fanny Hill
The End of the Affair
The War of the Worlds

I'd say there was something I liked about each one of these, although I wasn't much of a fan of The Leopard. The one that stands out as my very favourite is The End of the Affair.

I read 27 books off of the list this year.

My favorites were:
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor
Alberta and Jacob by Cora Sandel
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Evelina by Frances Burney

And the ones that didn't work for me:
Oranges are not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
La Regenta by Leopoldo Alas
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Actually, all of the four that I didn't particularly like I thought had merit in being on the list, I just personally didn't enjoy them.

Of the 80 books I've read this year, the following got 4.5-5 stars:

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - brilliantly entertaining structure and stories
Absalom, Absalom - William Faulkner - mesmerising "Southern" prose
The Colour - Rose Tremain
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy - wonderfully realised hellish environment
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - John Le Carre - gripping thriller

and at the other end of the scale, the following got 1.5 - 2 for being dreary and confusing:

Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon and I will probably never get on
Downriver - Iain Sinclair - a Group Challenge book that hopefully saved others a great deal of pain
The Lusiads - Luis Vaz de Camoes - helped by footnotes, but these were almost as fawning as the epic poem they were describing

while with 1 star the bottom of the heap is:

The Wild Boys - William S Burroughs - barely coherent gay porn fantasy

Look forward to joining you all through next year for more sharing of the Good and the Bad of the 1001 List.

Most of my 1001 reads this year were good but a couple stood above the rest:

W, or the memory of childhood - which I read for the Group Challenge. I'm now looking forward to reading everything Georges Perec ever wrote
Rashomon - A short story that packed quite a punch where each sentence was carefully crafted
The opposing shore - another Group Challenge read and one I would recommend

Some that were the opposite of favorites:

Arcanum 17 - already forgotten all about it
To the lighthouse - I've had mixed success with Woolfe over the years, but this one literally bored me to sleep
Nausea - good writing I guess, and it was very influential, but the wrong book for me

I read a number of 1001 books but the one book that impressed me(in that it affected me most) was The Wasp Factory by Ian Banks. The experience was like rubber necking a bad accident, I just had to look. The writing was superb, the subject matter very disturbing. I loved it.

Nice post! I really like these lists!

My 4,5 and 5 star reads this year were:
This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen
Wuthering Heights
The Marriage Plot
The Monk
A Gate at the Stairs
A Dance to the Music of Time

At the bottom this year come:
Humphrey Clinker
Troubling Love

I liked almost all of the list books I read this year, and it's impossible to pick a favorite. The best were:

The Death of Artemio Cruz
Ethan Frome
Mercier and Camier
Night and Day
Love in Excess
Platero and I
Insatiability

My least favorites:

The Apes of God
Facundo
Grimus
Retreat without Song

Only 1 5* masterpiece for me this year which was Anna Karenina although Midnight's Children came close and it's hard not to marvel at the beauty, ambition and sheer scale of Proust.

Equally only 1 duffer this year, Gargantua and Pantagruel

Overall a quieter but very enjoyable year of reading.

I haven't covered the whole year but my 5* have been Les Miserables as it would have been sacrilege to rate it any less highly and The House of Mirth which I've just finished. I am also currently reading Infinite Jest which I am pretty sure will be another 5* although I'm only a bit over 200 pages in and it won't be finished this year.

Life of Pi was fabulous as well but I can't rate it a masterwork.

For my disappointments I have On the Road, Here's to You Jesusa! and The Home and the World