When Diane retired 14 years ago, she bought a Toshiba TV as a retirement gift to herself. Diane liked the built-in DVD and VHS players as well as the crisp color on the screen (state of the art back then!). We connected the Toshiba to the Time Warner Cable and everything was copasetic until TWC morphed into SPECTRUM. SPECTRUM sent us a letter declaring they were going 100% digital TV. All of our TVs would require their digital cable boxes. I called SPECTRUM and ordered the digital boxes. When they arrived, we found out that the digital box connected to the TVs with a HDMI cable. The Toshiba TV was too old to have a HDMI port.

So Diane and I went to BJ’s Warehouse where we found the SAMSUNG 28″ HDTV for $199. We didn’t need a big screen HDTV (we already have a 65″ SONY 4K HDTV in our living room). The new Samsung, like the old Toshiba, sits on a dresser in the computer room (aka, Patrick’s room) and is used basically to check THE WEATHER CHANNEL or scores during football season. Setup of the digital boxes was easy. “Activation” over the phone by SPECTRUM took longer than I wished. But, everything is set up and working fine. This is our second SAMSUNG HDTV. Costumer Reports ranks SAMSUNG at the top of their HDTV recommendations. If you’re a SPECTRUM subscriber, be prepared to transition to 100% digital HDTV. Do you like your TVs or do you want to upgrade like we did?

When I was a kid in the 1950s, I’d rush home from school so I could watch The Cisco Kid on TV. From 1950 to 1956 Cisco and his wacky sidekick Pancho rode across the Wild West righting wrongs and stirring up trouble with Bad Guys. Based on O. Henry’s fabulous “Robin Hood of the Old West,” The Cisco Kid featured characters that were very different from the dozens of Westerns on television at that time. This box set presents 10 hours and 45 minutes of action and adventure. Were you a fan of the Cisco Kid and Pancho? GRADE: B+
DISC 1
Ball Bar Jellies
Big Switch
Buried Treasure
Cattle Rustling
Chain Lightning
DISC 2
Freightline Feud
Dog Story
Counterfeit Money
Convict Story
Confession for Money
DISC 3
Ghost Town
Heaven for Heavies
Jewelry Holdup
Lynching Story
Medicine Flats
DISC 4
Quick Silver Murder
Protective Association
Poncho Hostage
Oil Land
Newspaper Crusade
DISC 5
Railroad Landrush
Solen Bonds
Uncle Disinherits Niece
Water Rights
Well

Generous Beth Fedyn sent me an Advanced Reading Copy of Francine Prose’s What to Read and Why, a book that will be published in July 2018. I’ve been a fan of Francine Prose since I read her Blue Angel (2000), a novel about a college professor who becomes obsessed with a female student. But, Francine Prose has another side. She’s a gifted reviewer and essayist. What To Read And Why provides plenty of evidence of Prose’s wit and knowledge. I really liked “On Clarity” and “What Makes a Short Story?” When I read Francine Prose writing about Dickens, Balzac, Gissing, Mavis Gallant, Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Austen, and Alice Munro I wanted to drop everything and read something by these writers. If you’re looking for an excellent literary essay collection, I highly recommend What To Read And Why. GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Author’s Note v
Introduction xv
1. Ten Things That Art Can Do 3
2. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 15
3. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations 28
4. Honore de Balzac, Cousin Bette 41
5. George Eliot, Middlemarch 48
6. George Gissing, New Grub Street 63
7. The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant 70
8. Roberto Bolano, 2666 82
9. Complimentary Toilet Pater: Some Thoughts on Character and Language–Michael Jeffrey Lee, George Saunders, John Cheever, Denis Johnson 86
10. Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels 111
11. Paul Bowles, The Stories of Paul Bowles and The Spider’s House 118
12. Patrick Hamilton, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky: A London Trilogy; The Slaves of Solitude; Hangover Square: A Story of Darkest Earl’s Court 125
13. Isaac Babel 138
14. Lolita, Just the Dirty Parts: On the Erotic and Pornography 143
15. Gitta Sereny, Cries Unheard 154
16. Andrea Canobbio, Three Light Years 163
17. Diane Arbus: Revelations 174
18. Helen Levitt, Crosstown 186
19. Mark Strand, Mr. and Mrs. Baby 193
20. Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle 198
21. Elizabeth Taylor, Complete Short Stories 209
22. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women 213
23. Jane Austen 217
24. Charles Baxter, Believers 224
25. Deborah Levy, Swimming Home 229
26. Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women 233
27. Jennifer Egan, Manhatten Beach 238
28. Rebecca West 237
29. Mahsin Hamid, Exit West 251
30. On Clarity 261
31. Reiner Stach, Is That Kafka? 99 Finds 281
32. What Makes a Short Story? 292
33. In Praise of Stanley Elkin 304
Permissions 319
Acknowledgements 322

With the Apple USB SuperDrive you can play and burn both CDs and DVDs, play MP3 files (like audio books), and listen to music CDs on your iMac. It’s perfect when you want to watch a DVD movie, install software, create backup discs, and more. Only slightly bigger than a CD case, the Apple USB SuperDrive slips easily into your travel bag when you hit the road and takes up little space on your desk or tray table when you’re working. You’ll never have to worry about lost cables with the Apple USB SuperDrive. It connects to your MacBook Pro with Retina display, MacBook Air, iMac, or Mac mini with a single USB cable that’s built into the SuperDrive. There’s no separate power adapter, and it works whether your Mac is plugged in or running on battery power. Just plug in the Apple USB SuperDrive into your Apple computer and it’s ready for use. Easy peasy!

I used my new Apple USB SuperDrive to install TURBOTAX. I’m listening to the unexpurgated Phineas Redux (23 hours, 43 minutes!) by Anthony Trollope (read by the brilliant Timothy West) on my Apple USB SuperDrive, too. For just $80, the Apple USB SuperDrive is a bargain! If you have an Apple computer, you need one of these! GRADE: A

If you had Oprah, Mindy Kaling, and Reese Witherspoon in your movie, would you just let them stand around? That’s pretty much what happens in this version of A Wrinkle in Time. The prevailing opinion was that A Wrinkle in Time was “unfilmable.” The current film certainly provides proof that might be true, a least in this case. I read Madeleine L’Engle’s classic back in the early 1960s. Madeleine L’Engle had the same problems J. K. Rowling did in trying to get her book published. The fact that the lead character was female (and smart!) made the book a Hard Sell. A Wrinkle in Time won the Newbery Medal, Sequoyah Book Award, and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award and went on to become a best selling children’s book.

Basically, A Wrinkle in Time is a child’s search for her father. Meg Murray is a bitter 13-year-old trying to deal with the mysterious disappearance of her father. Meg’s little brother, Charles Wallace, and Meg’s schoolmate, Calvin O’Keefe, join her on a galactic journey to find her father aided by the powers of Oprah, Mindy Kaling, and Reese Witherspoon’s alien characters. Chris Pine plays Meg’s father, but he isn’t given much to do either. This is a very static film.

If you’re going to see this movie version of A Wrinkle in Time set the bar low. GRADE: C

I’m a big fan of the “MAMMOTH” series of anthologies. They provide great value and plenty of wonderful stories! Maxim Jakublowki’s The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (2014) presents 33 stories from the 1930s to the 1990s. It weighs in at 814 pages and I picked it up for a dollar at a Library Book Sale! Talk about bargains! As you can see from the Table of Contents, there’s a variety of stories in this anthology by a variety of writers from a variety of eras. Think of this book as a Pulp Fiction buffet! Do you see any of your favorite writers here? GRADE: B+
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction by Maxim Jakubowski xiii
The Diamond Wager (1929) by Samuel Dashiell (Dashiell Hammett) 1
Flight to Nowhere (1955) by Charles Williams 21
The Tasting Machine (1949) by Paul Cain 84
Finders Killers! (1953) by John D. MacDonald 101
The Murdering Kind! (1953) by Robert Turner 130
Cigarette Girl (1953) by James M. Cain 173
The Getaway (1976) by Gil Brewer 185
Preview of Murder (1949) by Robert Leslie Bellem 194
Forever After (1960) by Jim Thompson 236
The Bloody Tide (1950) by Day Keene 244
Death Comes Gift-Wrapped (1948) by William P. McGivern 277
The Girl Behind the Hedge (1953) by Mickey Spillane 290
One Escort–Missing Or Dead (1940) by Roger Torrey 301
Don’t Burn Your Corpses Behind You (1954) by William Rough 325
A Candle for the Bag Lady (1977) by Lawrence Block 378
Black Pudding (1953) by David Goodis 408
A Matter of Principal (1989) by Max Allan Collins 433
Citizen’s Arrest (1966) by Charles Willeford 444
The Sleeping Dog (1965) by Ross Macdonald 451
The Wench Is Dead (1953) by Fredric Brown 467
So Dark for April (1953) by Howard Browne, writing as John Evans 493
We Are All Dead (1955) by Bruno Fischer 516
Death Is a Vampire (1944) by Robert Bloch 552
The Blue Steel Squirrel (1946) Frank R. Read 576
A Real Nice Guy (1980) by William F. Nolan 615
Stacked Deck (1987) by Bill Pronzini 626
So Young, So Fair, So Dead (1973) by John Lutz 648
Effective Medicine (1954) by B. Traven 669
Nicely Framed, Ready to Hang! (1952) by Dan Gordon 680
The Second Coming (1966) by Joe Gores 704
Pale Hands I Loathed (1947) by William Campbell Gault 714
The Dark Goddess (1955) by Samuel G. Edsall 730
Ordo (1977) by Donald E. Westlake 756

I’m a big fan of Martha Wells’s work, but I wasn’t engaged by Razor’s Edge: Star Wars Legends (2013). Princess Leia is on the run after the destruction of her home planet, Alderaan, by the Death Star. Razor’s Edge takes place before the events in Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back. Needing supplies, Leia and her small band of rebels are captured by space pirates. However, Leia learns the pirates were survivors of the Alderaan tragedy. She thinks she might be able to recruit them to the rebel cause. But, the Empire is searching for Princess Leia. Han Solo, along with Luke, Chewbacca, 3-CPO, and R2D2 attempt to keep Leia safe in this hostile space pirate environment. Lots of chase scenes. Some run-of-the-mill space battles. Nothing special. Are you a fan of these STAR WARS novels? GRADE: C

Thomas Wolfe wrote You Can’t Go Home Again and based on this 10-episode season, FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) should have retired and stayed away from this retread series. The magic of the original, iconic series is gone. The paranoia and conspiracy aspects of the original X-Files seasons now seem ordinary and pedestrian. The UFO aspects don’t resonate as they once did. Watching these new episodes was a slog. As B. B. King sang, “The Thrill is Gone.” Were you a fan of the original The X-Files? GRADE: C-

When I was a kid, my favorite DC superhero was The Flash. I loved the idea of super speed. And The Flash used his intelligence to defeat his villains instead of just using his super speed. In this new LEGO animated feature, The Flash finds himself in a time-loop. His nemesis, Reverse Flash, tricks The Flash into losing his powers. The Justice League is also tricked into kicking The Flash out of their organization. Things look bleak for our speed-challenged hero. But wait, there are some clever surprises that Reverse Flash didn’t anticipate. I enjoyed this fun film. If you want to delight the little kid in you watch LEGO DC Super Heroes: The Flash. Do you have a favorite DC superhero? GRADE: B+

Just in time to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Mickey Spillane’s birth, Hard Case Crime is publishing The Last Stand, a book with two previously unpublished Spillane novellas. As Max Allan Collins discusses in his informative Introduction, “A Bullet For Satisfaction” was written around the mid-1950s. It has the style of I, the Jury with an ex-cop narrating his fury of vengeance against The Syndicate for the killing of a politician. Rod Dexter, former Captain of Homicide, loses his position on bogus charges. But that only fires up his crusade to get even with the gangsters who are trying to take over his town. Yes, there’s a dash of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest in “A Bullet for Satisfaction,” too.

“The Last Stand” was the last completed manuscript Mickey Spillane wrote. Max Allan Collins estimates “The Last Stand” was finished shortly before Mickey Spillane’s death in 2006. It’s an adventure story featuring Joe Gillian, a pilot, whose antique plane is forced to make an emergency landing in the desert because of a mechanical problem. Joe meets a Native American who calls himself Sequoia Pete and his beautiful sister, Running Fox. Joe finds himself drawn into a battle with government agents, criminals, and local tribe politics. Lost Aztec treasure and mysterious arrowheads propel the plot to a thunderous conclusion.

Mickey Spillane knew how to tell a story and now Hard Case Crime brings us two of his best! Don’t miss The Last Stand! GRADE: B+