The Reading Life Big Reads 2014 Fiction List

I have decided to once again list my "Big Reads" for the past year.  (I will do a separate list for nonfiction.)

One very long novel and two short stories had by far the biggest impact upon me. I will list those works first and then the remaining in no particular order with comments occasionally.

1.  "Kleist in Thun" by Robert Walser. This supreme work of art left me stunned. Art of the highest quality.

2.  In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past) by Marcell Proust and translated by C. K. Scott Moncireff.  I wish I could live in this world.  I will begin rereading it soon.

3.  "The Walk" by Robert Walser.   An amazing longer short story.

                                                                               The Rest

1.The Ambassadors by Henry James

2.  War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy - my third read

3.  The Leopard by Giueseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - set to reread in 2015

4.  Stoner by John Williams - not on the level of a true classic but worth rereading

5.  As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner 

6.  Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac

7.  The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy 

8.  The Bell Jar by Slyvia Plath - been meaning to read this for a very long time.

9.   Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.  Ice cold perfection

10.  Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham 

11.  Jacob von Gunter by Robert Walser

12.  Embers by Sandor Marai - now on my read all I can list.

13.  The Leaves of Grey by Desmond Hogan - only two living authors on list

14.  Life Goes On by Hans Keilson - I have now read all his works. Must read Holocaust Era Literature.

15.  Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse

16.  The Trial by Franz Kafka - must reading. 

17.  The Wide Saragossa Sea by Jean Rhys.  I love this book beyond reason.

18.  The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch

19.  The Dram Shop by Emile Zola.  A really fun novel about the lower depths of Paris

20.  The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles - a beautiful work 

21.  The Roman Woman by Alberto Moravio

22.  Signatures in Stone by Linda Lappin. - award winning historical fiction of the highest quality. One of two living writers on my Big Reads list.  

23.  Hamlet by William Shakespeare 

24.  Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus 

25.  Middlemarch by George Eliot 

26.  V by Thomas Pynchon 

27.  Notes from the House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky 

Other than the two stories by Robert Walser which simply demanded inclusion, this list does not encompass my short story readings.  For now I find this to intense and personal to render a best of list.