Recommended with love...

My library has rickety metal shelves crowded tight with books; thrillers, suspense, humour and romance all jostle for space along with a few books I cannot classify into a sub-category of fiction. The front of the library has a few well-organised, non-cluttered shelves filled with recommendations. And so far, most of those I've picked from that shelf (90%) have been wonderful reads.

I read:
1. Playing for Pizza by John Grisham
2. Scarlet Feather by Maeve Binchy
3. The Best Laid Plans by Sidney Sheldon

What I've got this evening: How Stella got her Groove Back

Hope I'm in for another treat. I havent seen the movie. I'd liked Terry McMillan's previous book 'Waiting to Exhale' although the movie was not as good. So, I guess I'm not missing too much if I read the book before I see the movie.

But what surprised me was John Grisham's off-his-beaten-track novel. Playing for Pizza was written when he visited Parma in Italy to write another book. It's about a quarterback who is booted and booed out of the NFL and gets an assignment to play with the Parma Panthers for the Italian Super Bowl. From the heavens to what he thinks is a personal hell for him, he descends from the NFL to a richer experience in both football and life, the one he'd really left behind when chasing star-studded dreams with the NFL. His first dinner in Parma with his coach and a few team members is quite an event, causing a change in his own perception to snowball and gain him not the biggest but the most important victory in his own personal battlefield. An experience at the opera is sensual and stimulating. It's a book for the senses, best enjoyed with a goblet of the deepest, fruitiest red, a cool terrace and evening turning into dusk. Magic does not always unfold between the pages of bestsellers; it's in the understated, often overlooked books that it resides and overwhelms you with its might.