Nancy's Reads & Reels: Recommending a Book or a Movie

Recommending a book is a dicey proposition.

If you do, the person you recommended it to might blame you if they dislike the book or felt it was a waste of time. My friends and family sometimes ask me for a recommendation and I'm only too happy to oblige. Do I like every book I read? Most of the time yes, because I have read excerpts and reviews.

I just finished Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand and now I'm reading The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta. I usually don't read a book twice but I recently reread Growing Up by Russell Baker -- loved it!

When it comes to movies, everybody has an opinion. As an example, The Tree of Life (will this movie ever end, I don't get it, Brad Pitt was great, etc.) Everybody weighed in on The Help. I hope to write about movies that people might overlook.

My daughter and I went to see Margaret. The movie was actually shot six years ago and is only in limited release. We liked it and thought it worth 2 1/2 hours. Margaret is about a girl named Lisa. The title is taken from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall to a Young Child. Lisa lives in New York and attends a private school. Her parents are divorced and she lives with her mother, an actress. Anna Paquin stars with J. Smith-Cameron as her mother. Matthew Broderick, Mark Ruffalo and Matt Damon have small parts. A bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) runs a red light and kills a woman. Lisa had distracted the bus driver and so feels partly responsible. There are other plots and characters, all of them interesting.

Also went to see Ides of March and liked that. Yeah, I see a lot of movies. So that's me: book worm and movie buff.