Best work of fiction

Some of the illustrious blog crew - Lance Mannion, Pandagon, Rob Farley - are discussing the recent NY Times list of Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years. These kinds of lists are often rather silly since one may have very good reasons for considering a work such as (non-American) Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano great for rather individual reasons but less for public ones. Not to say that there's no objectivity to divining great literature, but I've done it with records and find that the top five or ten would have to include, for me, records that I know most other people wouldn't put in the list.

The NY Times top five, according to some 200 or so critics, if you can't stand waiting, are:

1. Beloved, Tony Morrison
2. Underworld, Don Delillo
3. Rabbit Angstrom, John Updike
4. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth

I haven't read one of them, though I've read at least something by all of these authors. I'm not particularly enamored by any of them.

But here's the problem: since writing my dissertation I've been able to read maybe one or two fiction works per year and that's it. I read all day off and on, but most of it is geared to my academic profession. When I have leisure time - whatever that is - I feel guilty if I'm not reading something that fills a gap in my understanding directly or indirectly related to my fields. The nightstand has a stack of novels to be read. The stack has grown over the past several years and not one of them has been read. When you read all day, the last thing you want to do is more reading when you're done for the day. Watching a baseball or basketball game is more like it. The last really good novel I read was John Banville's The Untouchable several years ago.

This, however, runs counter to an earlier mission gained in high school and undergrad days, which was to read the major works of every national or linguistic literary tradition. A tough project, and one involving arbitrary guidelines for the idea behind "a tradition," but I set out on it. Periods, which overlapped, included,

The Beats
The Great Russian Novels (beginning with Turgenev's Fathers and Sons)
The Great Modern Latin American Works (the obvious greats like Garcia-Marquez and Cortazar, but also somewhat lesser-known authors such as Juan Rulfo)
Italian Modern Literature (the obvious Eco and Calvino, but also Buzatti, Landolfi, Gadda, etc.)
The Great Czechs (Kafka, Skvorecky, Kundera, etc.)
Classics of Japanese Literature from Murasaki to Murakami (favorites are Tanizaki and Oe)
German Philosophical Literature (Goethe, Musil, Broch, Walser, Handke, etc.)

Then it petered out. It was unsustainable. I did an MA thesis, taught, wrote, did a doctoral dissertation, taught, wrote, teach, write. Read constantly.

Don't you find this to be the case? How do academics who aren't literature professors find the time and the ability to read fiction (of course, keeping in mind that some nonfiction works border on fiction)? I would love to be able to sit still and pay attention to a novel again. Alas, even summers are for catching up, writing anew.

And you? Have you recently read a great work of fiction aside from the orthodoxy?