Best and worst books of 2015

With the end of the year approaching quickly, I think it is time to look back and recall our best and worst 1001 books of 2015. I'll start:

Best reads (all 4.5 stars, no 5 stars for me this year!):
The End of the Story
Midaq Alley
The Comfort of Strangers
The Sea, the Sea
Austerlitz
The Forsyte Saga

Worst reads (the 1 or 1.5 star books):
Arcanum 17
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The Water Babies
Molloy

Best
Infinite Jest
The Moonstone
London Fields 4 1/2 stars
Midnight's Children
Our Mutual Friend
Uncle Silas

Worst
Our Lady of the Assassins
The Pilgrim's Progress
The Castle of Otranto
The Drowned World
Lady Chatterley's Lover

Best:
Mrs. Dalloway
The Periodic Table
Everything that Rises Must Converge
Life is a Caravanserai

Worst:
The Elementary Particles
The Crying of Lot 49
Downriver
The Nun
The Virgin Suicides
Humphrey Clinker

Books that I rated in the middle but keep thinking/talking about:
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Silence
them

Best:

Invisible Man - move over Great Gatsby, this is the Great American Novel
Siddharta

Worst:
The Idiot
Mercier and Camier

Only two books entered my Hall of Fame this year:
Independent People
Lolita

Two books off the list shared the joint worst rating of 41% this year:
Nemesis by Philip Roth
The Blithedale Romance

Best:
In Watermelon Sugar
To the North & Eva Trout

Worst:
The Young Man
Crime and Punishment

Best (4.5 and 5 stars):

Written on the Body
Beloved
Day of the Triffids
If This Is a Man
Rabbit, Run
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Infinite Jest
Invisible Cities
Anna Karenina
I'm Not Scared
The Book of Disquiet

Worst (2.5 stars):

Corelli's Mandolin
A Gate at the Stairs

A pretty remarkably positive year, I have to say.

Three 5 star books this year:

Queen Margot
Germinal
Kingdom of this World
with Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon close behind on 4.5/5

Seven books ranked 2/5, but one book stood out on 1.5/5

The Atrocity Exhibition

I think I read 26 books off the list this year.

Best 1001 books:
The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Chess Story by Stefan Zweig
Independent People by Haldor Laxness
Troubles by J.G Farrell
Transit by Anna Seghers

Worst 1001 books:
Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West (this earned a very rarely given 1 star)

Best:
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (even though it took a long while to get through)
The Gathering by Anne Enright
Crash by J.G. Ballard

Worst:
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Best:
The Color Purple
Half of a Yellow Sun
The God of Small Things
Loved all three of these and can't believe I had never read them!

Worst:
Catch 22
I'm about half way through and just not enjoying it at all. Not enough story and too much blah........ but I refuse to give up!

Looking at everyone's 'best' selections with interest and will probably find a few of them on my 1001 pile for 2016.

Lol. Catch-22 is my top favorite book ever.

I read very few 1001 books this year, and most were neither dreadful nor wonderful (to me, anyway).

Best (4 stars)
Sula
Cain

Worst (1 star)
The Enormous Room

Elainedav if you didn't like Catch-22 then I wouldn't be in a hurry to read Infinite Jest which has appeared twice on 'Best Of' lists. It is quite similar to Catch-22 (which I absolutely adored and read so many times my cover dissolved on me) and is much longer and a more difficult read.

>12 Elainedav: I agree on Catch 22. I've started it several times, but never been able to finish it. I enjoy the humor for the first twenty pages or so and then it makes the same points over and over and over like a bad comedian.

It's fun to see how people will agree on several books and then disagree on several more.

The ones I enjoyed most:

Midaq Alley - Naguib Mahfouz - quickly becoming one of my favorite authors
Silence - Shusaku Endo
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin

I didn't really have a worst of this year - nothing below 3.5 stars. Lucky me!

Best:
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Bridge on the Drina
Cold Comfort Farm
The Remains of the Day

Worst:
The Body Artist
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Waiting For the Barbarians
Perfume

I am so very far behind on reviewing and hope to finish one or two more books this year, but....

Best
The Brothers Karamazov
London Fields
The Street of Crocodiles

Worst
Casino Royale

Great topic!

Best (4.5 or higher)
Swann's Way
Silence
Woman at Point Zero
Troubles
The Collector

So many group reads... I should let you guys pick my books more often. :)

Worst
Dining on Stones
How late it was, how late
Journey to the Center of the Earth

Best 1001 Books
Daniel Deronda
Fifth Business
Troubles
The Awakening

Worst
The Long Goodbye

Since I only read 1001 books that I think I will like even The Long Goodbye I rated at 3 stars but it really was quite disappointing.

Best for this year:
The Plague
The Last World
The Awakening
Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day
Moon Palace
The Sea
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Worst:
Walden
Robinson Crusoe
The Corrections
Summer
The Good Soldier

Best:
The Plague
The Call of the Wild
The Sorrows of Young Werther
The Awakening
Fruits of the Earth
Madam Bovary

Worst:
The Nose
Miss Lonelyhearts
The Unfortunate Traveller

Aww, two mentions for the worst books for Miss Lonelyhearts, a title I am in habit of naming as my favourite book of all time...

yes, its really interesting seeing what people like and don't like isn't it, I really enjoy the reviews. I have added Troubles to my reading list after seeing it mentioned x 3 here as a fave.

I thought The Nose was funny and its great trying to explain the book to people that have never read it before. Madam Bovary is one of my favorites but I like House of Mirth better.

I had my highest average rating to date this year with 3.65 over 54 books.

2 books made my 5 start hall of fame: Gone with the Wind and Magic Moutain
Germinal, Middlemarch, Love in the Time of Cholera just missed the cut on 4.5 stars.

I didn't rate anything below 3 stars so I don't really have any worsts. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle was pretty disappointing. If I had to single out my least favourite reads I'd probably say Country Girls and Rasselas.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Max Havelaar, and Invisible Man were my favorites, my 4.5 star reads out of the ten I read this year. None were lower than 3.5, no "worst" for me.

Love this - it's amazing how different everyone's opinions are which is what makes literature great I guess. Some of my all time favourites are in the worst and some I detested are in the best!

I didn't read any I loathed this year, though a few were meh. Loved Cloud Atlas and Small Island. The Dispossessed was a good read and The Razor's edge. I also really enjoyed Burgess' Enderby novels.

I only got to 8 list books in 2015.

Pleasantly surprised by:

The Grass is Singing
The Swimming Pool Library
Black Water

Disappointing:

The Story of O
Smila's Sense of Snow

I read just 19 books in 2015 and looking over that list now, there were several 3.5 and 4 stars, but not a single book I "couldn't have lived without". Not a great year.

I enjoyed most:
Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf (the best 1,001 I read this year but only #3 in my VW ranking)
Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

Most disappointing:
The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
The Devil's Pool by Georges Sand
The Information by Martin Amis

I only read 6 1001 books in 2015 and here's how I rated them:

5 stars
Rebecca

4 stars
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Their Eyes Were Watching God
The Plague

3.5 stars
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Vanity Fair