It’s the most fun you could have all year, maybe the most fun in five years. What I discovered at this year’s Martha’s Vineyard International Film Festival was, you need a big breakfast on each of the four days and a powerful multivitamin to build your strength. Though stamina for this event has nothing to do with age: 82-year-old Doreen Kinsman is the all-time movie maximizer, able to view 12 to 14 screenings (out of 36-plus offered, three per time slot) per festival. I believe she also can leap tall buildings in a single bound.

David Crohan has been blind from birth, but that hardly kept him from crawling up on his grandmother’s piano bench at the age of two and finding that his fingers could extract marvelous melodies. Within a year he could sing and play a hundred songs from memory.

After an adolescence spent at the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, with emphasis on music training, his life became a whirlwind of solo recitals, chamber music performances and concert appearances with symphony orchestras.

Remember that old 1950s TV show that posed the question, “Can this marriage be saved?” presenting his story, her story and a wrap-up by an expert? Most marriages hit rough spots, and when the subjects share their gripes, the listener find himself or herself silently asking the above question.

MELTING DOWN. By Harvey Stone (The Way Things Are Publications), $28.95.

It’s surprising there aren’t more spooky thrillers that include mysteries, and more mysteries with spooks. When equal mixtures are applied — in other words, scary stuff happening for which a reason must be found — fans of both genres put the books on the top 10 list and a classic is born: The Exorcist, Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, The Shining, even Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, her attempt to write a hot-selling Gothic novel, a genre that runs in and out of fashion but was very much in vogue at the time. Ms.