Books and DVDs

I've been writing some every day, and today was no different. But I also found the time to stop by a Half Price Books location that I don't visit very often. I came out with four books:

A trade paperback called ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A LITERARY REFERENCE, which seems to be a year-by-year overview of Hemingway's work, including letters between him and Maxwell Perkins, assorted reviews, photocopies of manuscript pages, etc. I'm a big Hemingway fan, so I'll browse through this one happily, I'm sure.

The movie tie-in edition of Daniel Woodrell's Civil War novel WOE TO LIVE ON, under the movie title of RIDE WITH THE DEVIL. I never saw the movie, and I've only read one Woodrell novel, TOMATO RED, which I thought was okay but not something that was going to make me a big fan of his work. I liked it well enough to give this one a try, though.

Ace Double F-285, SHIPS TO THE STARS by Fritz Leiber and THE MILLION YEAR HUNT by Kenneth Bulmer. The Leiber is a short story collection. The only thing I've read by Bulmer was a Viking novel under a pseudonym, but it was pretty good.

NAKED IN A CACTUS GARDEN by Jesse Lasky Jr., a Hollywood novel I'd never heard of, but I generally like trashy Hollywood novels.

Not a great haul, but I'll take it.

I watched one of the Flash Gordon episodes on DVD, and while it was pretty cheap and hokey, I enjoyed it. Steve Hollard sports an odd hair style in this series, but for a non-actor he's pretty good, and so are the action scenes. Bill Crider has been talking about the Mr. and Mrs. North TV series starring Richard Denning and Barbara Britton (check out the photo of Ms. Britton on Bill's blog, if you haven't seen it already). I haven't seen any of the TV episodes, but years ago I read nearly all of the Mr. and Mrs. North novels by Francis and Richard Lockridge and really enjoyed them. I also read their series about a police detective named Heimrich, I think. Richard Lockridge continued writing after his wife's death, but the books weren't nearly as good, leading me to suspect that she plotted most of them.