P. J. O'Rourke

The politics of the moment are pompous, bilious, unforgiving, over-stuffed, hypocritical beyond the normal standards for political hypocrisy: in other words, designed — as if by divine ordinance — for the gifts of P.J. O’Rourke. I must add, I’m afraid, the late P.J. Rourke. He died the day after Valentine’s Day due to complications from cancer, at age seventy-four. RIP. The world hadn’t heard a great deal about him in a while, likely because he was ailing. This was rotten timing. The current Washington DC sideshow reflects and confirms what Patrick Jake O’Rourke had been saying about politics for some long while. Such as: “I believe in original sin, and politics may be its name.

Matt Labash I read a lot of books. Probably well over sixty in the last year. I’m not saying that in some little-kid braggadocious way. After all, I’m fifty-one years old. Though some have said I read on a fifty-two-year-old level. In addition to the couple of books I have open at any time, a good deal of my book consumption comes via audio: I have an audiobook going in my car or on my MP3 player at all times. And at my advanced age, if I don’t dog-ear and underline a book, it’s lost down the memory hole forever, no matter how much I liked it. But one I do remember liking so much that it bears mentioning, is John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet (Penguin, $28).

Our turkeys were stuffed and now we are too. Reclining helplessly in the recovery position, our thoughts turn to feasts future. What better way to show your friends and family that you love them, and also that you have impeccable taste, than sending them a book? In The Spectator’s stocking-stuffing December issue our staff, writers and friends make their seasonal suggestions for Books of the Year: stack upon stack of the most riotous reads, bibliographical beauties and pandemical page-turners. P.J. O’Rourke The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume I, by Gibbon, because in this year of scourge and collapsing polity it seemed apposite. And only Volume I, due to reader fatigue after 582 pages and the shift in Volume II to the history of Byzantium.