To watch and to read

I'm terrible about making time to go to the movies - ironic, because I love them and think each time I go that it's the very best I've ever seen. "The Hunger Games" was perhaps the last in-the-movie-theater movie I saw, which tells you something. But the film that's going to get me in my car is most definitely "What Maisie Knew," based on the Henry James novel, about the breakup of a marriage told from a child's perspective. In a review, Time Magazine says it's difficult to watch but is "the most provocative movie about parenting ... since 'The Kids Are All Right.'"

Speaking of parenting, I'm waiting for my library-reserved copy of What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-One Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most. In these essays, women writers tell about gifts from their mothers that impacted their lives in profound and often unexpected ways. One writes of leopard-print shoes; another of a horse; and a third about a year of sobriety before her mother died of alcoholism.

One box of Kleenex for the movies; one for my bedside table.