Sometimes the most intriguing books are those not easily categorized. While Boston-area writer Dawn Paul’s new book is fiction, it straddles a cognitive divide between memoir and invention, between what we feel is real and what we believe is imagination.

This week’s suggestions: Watch the X Paralympic Winter Games, check out one of the new movies, get ready for the time change, prepare for Selection Sunday and start celebrating St. Patrick’s Day.

Leon Chiappini hooks a tire-sized cymbal around his finger and spins it like a basketball. He hits it and listens for the ding, the gravel and the growl: elements of crash that the average ear can’t hear. If it’s not perfect, Chiappini tosses it in the reject pile. “After 49 years, I’d better know if it’s good,” he said with a laugh.

Patriot Ledger film critic Al Alexander makes his annual picks for the top winners at the Academy Awards, which are being handed out Sunday.

Corrupt cops may be “in” right now in Hollywood (see this weekend’s new release, “Brooklyn’s Finest,” from “Training Day” director Antoine Fuqua), but my favorite kind of movie cop is a buddy cop.

Roughly 15 years ago, two freshmen at Ithaca College were eager to do anything except study, so they began melding one’s poetry with the other’s guitar work. All these years later, would-be poet/songwriter Andy Campolieto and guitarist Ben Lee are the main figures in the Americana band Jo Henley, whose second full-length album “Inside Out” was released Feb. 16.

Michael Corleone, meet Malik El Djebena. I think you’ll find you have a lot in common, especially seeing how you both were so adamant about avoiding the thug life before fate and circumstance dictated otherwise.

If it weren’t for the cars and the telephones and the contemporary small-town setting, “Terribly Happy” could easily be mistaken for an old-fashioned Western. It’s a sort of classic story about a new sheriff coming to town, but not being exactly welcomed with open arms.

Alexis Bledel was a breath of fresh air when she boomeranged from TV’s “Gilmore Girls” to the big screen in “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” But like a lot of young actresses, things quickly went south.

Spooks, from both the metaphysical and espionage worlds, cast an ominous presence over Roman Polanski's “The Ghost Writer,” but it’s the underlying parallels to its author’s real life that prove most haunting.

For the duration of its grim two-hour ride, “Brooklyn’s Finest” is on to something in the vein of “Training Day,” “The Departed” and dash of “Crash.” It is a frenetic and tough police drama that puts the lives of three nearly burnt-out cops on a bloody collision course.

Tim Burton’s bold reinterpretation of “Alice in Wonderland” is the closest approximation to an acid trip you’ll encounter without indulging. Brimming with hallucinogenic imagery and characters you’d swear were sipping LSD-laced tea, Burton’s 3-D opus is sure to take “Fantasia’s” place as a favorite among hard-core stoners.

“Black Dynamite” was released in theaters last year, but if you didn’t know better, you’d swear it hit theaters back in 1972 — and not the most glamorous theaters, either.

When Wilbur Meyer’s mother gave him a box of old letters, he removed their stamps to add to his collection and threw the letters in the attic, where they stayed for about 45 years.

About five years ago, his wife, Peggy Meyer, came across the 23 letters, which were the correspondence of a husband, Thomas Blair Wooff, and his wife, Lovinia Jemina Pond Wooff, of Concord. The pair had been separated during the Civil War.

Based on the books "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass" by Lewis Carroll, this film comes packed with '60s psychedelic images including a hookah-smoking caterpillar and a floating cat. Imagine "The Wizard of Oz" on hallucinogens and you have an idea of how trippy the film looks.