Another Book Meme

Seen all over

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book. <lj-cut>

I've also marked with an asterisk anything I liked particularly well.
Works marked with a "U" were read as required texts for University. Works marked with a "P" were for PhD reading list. Works marked with an "O" were read in their original language

*Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
*One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi : a novel (94)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91) P
Moby Dick (86)
*Ulysses (84) U
Madame Bovary (83) U
The Odyssey (83) U, O
*Pride and prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)
War and peace (78)
Vanity fair (74)
*The time traveler's wife (73)
The Iliad (73) U, O
*Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70) P
Great expectations (70) S, U
American gods (68)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67)
Atlas shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
*Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury tales (64) U, O
The historian : a novel (63)
A portrait of the artist as a young man (63) U
Love in the time of cholera (62)
Brave new world (61) P
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
*Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A clockwork orange (59) U
Anansi boys (58)
The once and future king (57)
The grapes of wrath (57)
The poisonwood Bible : a novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & demons (56)
The inferno (56)
The satanic verses (55)
Sense and sensibility (55)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One flew over the cuckoo's nest (54)
To the lighthouse (54) U, P
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver's travels (53) U
Les misérables (53)
The corrections (53)
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
*The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (52)
Dune (51)
The prince (51)
The sound and the fury (51)
Angela's ashes : a memoir (51)
The god of small things (51)
A people's history of the United States : 1492-present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A confederacy of dunces (50)
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50) U
The unbearable lightness of being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-five (49)
The scarlet letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
*Cloud Atlas (47)
The confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger Abbey (46)
The catcher in the rye (46)
On the road (46)
The hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values (45)
The Aeneid (45) U, O
*Watership Down (44)
Gravity's rainbow (44)
*The Hobbit (44)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (44)
White teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The three musketeers (44)

On my personal to-read list:

Jane Eyre
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Guns, Germs and Steel
The God of Small Things

Quiet Anguish

Away From Her, Written and directed by Sarah Polley

I'm grateful to lidocafe for strongly recommending this movie, because I might not have had the courage to watch it otherwise. It was a lovely, simple, heartbreaking film, beautifully directed and lit from within by three marvellous performances.

Sadly, the [fucking] Academy is unlikely to notice, let alone reward, Gordon Pinsent's remarkable portrait of - yes - quiet anguish. He has been married for forty-four years to Fiona, played by a luminous Julie Christie. She has developed alzheimer's (or probably, more correctly, dementia) and is in a long-term care facility. Once there, she develops an attachment for another "inmate": the husband of Marian, the character played with remarkable restraint by Olympia Ducakis. The Gordon Pinsent character has to watch as first Fiona comes to life in the presence of this other man, and then pines and fades away when they are separated.

It's adapted from a short story by the wonderful Alice Munro, and it lives up to the quality of her work. Sarah Polley is to be congratulated for the restraint and real beauty she brings both to the script and to her direction of the three wonderful actors. Actually, all the performances were wonderful, and so many small scenes had remarkable impact. The one that brought me to tears was the exchange between Gordon Pinsent and a young punkish girl.

Overall, the movie is heartbreaking, as life can be heartbreaking, but not really sad. I found it at times hard to watch, more because of some emotional buttons of my own that it pressed. I spent hours, it feels like years in total, going in and out of hospital rooms to visit my mother or take her to visit her friends, and I still find it difficult to spend any time there, or, apparently, to see a movie about someone else doing that.
And then, there's my darling aunt who suffers from dementia, with whom I've had no contact for about three years although she still lives in a home in a village in Wales near her daughter. Because I spent some time with her when she was in the early stages of dementia, I can testify for the clarity of Julie Christie's performance, but that again makes it no less hard to watch.

Still, it is a beautiful film, and I'm glad I saw it.

What was that book he was reading out loud? Letters from Iceland? I'll have to Google it. (ETA: oh, it's Auden. No wonder)

And one silly comment: although the snow and wintry landscape was appropriate to the mood of the film, it is a shame that it's going to perpetuate false stereotypes about Canada. Because it was a thoroughly, unashamedly, Canadian film, and that was a great thing about it.