All Hat and a Bag of Chips

All Hat
Brad Smith
Penguin

A couple of Saturdays ago, I was wandering around the bookstore with some Christmas money burning a hole in my pocket. I had been having a difficult time finding something to read when, all of a sudden, a wobbly old lady lurched into my path. Truth be told, she almost took a header down the Chapters staircase and in my heroic effort to prevent a broken hip, I inadvertently knocked over part of a display. Happily for us both, I caught her in time and after getting a frail hug and a couple of kisses, I went to pick up the books that I had scattered. Once my hand touched Smith's All Hat, I knew it had to be mine. And they say good deeds usually go unrewarded. Hah! ...

All Hat is the story of Ray Dokes, a paroled ex-con who decides to return to the Ontario town of his childhood to re-establish some kind of "normal" life on the outside. His main goal is to stay out of trouble, but that proves difficult when the local bigshot, Sonny Stanton, is buying up all the farmland in the region and has his sights set on the place that just happens to belong to Ray's former girlfriend. Oh, did I mention that Ray went to jail for beating Sonny to a pulp after he found out that Sonny had raped Ray's little sister? Ray, it seems, has a taste for revenge and a plan that is so daring that it just might work. Or land him back in jail. You'll have to read it to find out.

Part Carl Hiaassen and part Alice Munroe, this story has a cast of characters that are at once infinitely zany and infinitely recognizable for those of us who grew up in a small Canadian town. I quite liked this novel and it is probably our first 2008 contender for the DES book of the year. Three sleek geldings out of five.

Withering ... Wuthering ... Whatever

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë

Penguin Classics

Hey gang -- so I finished Wuthering Heights on Monday. It is now a week later and I'm still struggling to find something relevant to say about this book. If you haven't read it before, WH is essentially a dark, brooding love story between two wholly unlikeable characters -- Mr. Heathcliff and his beloved, Catherine Earnshaw.

For me, the most fascinating element of this novel is the layers of narration. The story is told to the reader through Mr. Lockwood -- a tenant of Heathcliff's at Thrushcross Grange. He, in turn, is being told the story by Heathcliff's childhood playmate and former housekeeper, Nelly Dean. Other "eyewitness accounts" are shared with reader and it is amazing how Brontë manages to maintain the narrative's vibrancy and impact by essentially telling the tale through a series of "he said, she saids." While I didn't particularly care for any of the characters, I still really enjoyed this novel. Brontë's depiction of love as an all-consuming, soul-destroying force is as beautiful as it is terrifying. WH gets three howling winds across the moors out of five.

Brains ... I Need Brains ...

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Penguin Classics

Never have I purported to be the sharpest tool in the shed, but this is one classic that definitely went over my head. Here's the basic plot: Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, a depressed, really bright, but slightly mad former law student commits a random murder at the beginning of the novel. If you can look past the murder, he seems to be a fairly decent guy -- he wants to do right by his family, shares his meager funds with others less "fortunate" than he, and even falls for and is eventually redeemed by his love for Sonya, a young woman who is forced into prostitution to support her parents and siblings.

After the murder-- which happens in the first few chapters -- the rest of the novel deals with the Raskolnikov's inner struggle and how he copes with the psychological ramifications of what he has done. My problem with the book is that I don't get what motivated him to kill the old woman in the first place. I put the question to my friend Victor (an educated man and a lover of Russian literature) and his response was to quote a lyric from Cash's Folsom Prison Blues -- "I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die."

Um, okay, but that doesn't really get me any closer to the "why" of it. I'm going to be honest here -- I thought Rodion was a bit of a nihilist. And then I thought he had read too much Nietzsche (only sort of kidding.) And then I wondered if he was a plain ol' sociopath. Jury is still out. I'm meeting Victor for lunch on Sunday. Maybe he can help me make sense of it all. Four greasy kopecks out of five.