Wow - something good actually came from going to Aeon Headquarters! I discovered the book-swap bin, which I then proceeded to raid for a copy of Hey Rube as well as McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. In order to save money, I am going to swap this one for the one I had plan to read - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I'll get to it if I have time.

First, let it be said - I Understand All Now. I understand Ty, over at TRR, and his weird use of capitals, the random streaks of totally non-sensical hyperbole. It is all Thompson. Reading the first page of Hey Rube nullified an aeon of Ty and I arguing over style.

Which isn't to say I like it. I just know why Ty was writing that way. Anyway, Hey Rube is a collection of semi-sports-related rants that ESPN.com paid Hunter to write. I found myself drawn into the book even though over half of the material was boring. It was like a captivating person describing lint -- you are still captivated even though the material is dull. The main theme of the book was sports, or more specifically, sports-gambling. I found Hunter's autobiographical antics to be humourous, but the sports talk itself wasn't very interesting unless he was being really vituperative.

But then, sprinkled in like fragments of what I am pretty sure his other books are like, were his "digressions" on Bush, the new war on terror and the decline of America. These sections were by far the most insightful and interesting, and while they gave me a taste of what his style is really like, he usually cut himself off with a "whoops! I seem to be wandering...", feeling some sort of obligation to actually talk about sports.

This book was overall ho-hum, but if other books he has written are permitted a narrative longer than a couple pages and deal with a more interesting topic, you can count me in.