The odds of thorougly enjoying three Xmas books is about the same as Bradley getting the Bills to cover on the third game of a 28-1 parlay- not fucking good. Amazon delivered on time and with high quality. Here is the Trinity of My Reading Victory, covering the three major elements of life (and you can screw the spiritual).

The Personal- Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking briefly appeared here in review form before being whisked away into the cyberether where more important opinions lie. What to do when the ones close to you drop dead and nearly dead? Will the platitudes hold? Will the mind allow the fragility of all things, or will it force you to wash away the polite truths and shove you face first into the void? The most moving account of grief I've read in ages.

The Political- George Packer's The Assassin's Gate is the first big book to bring the narrative of the pre-war buildup, the immediate aftermath of Shock and Awe and the beginning of Now What?, the view from various grounds and the lives bleeding and crying on them, and the scramble to deal with the contingencies of insurgency that Cheney and Rumsfeld never anticipated. It's powerfully compelling and ultimately demoralizing, but it will help you get your mind around the narrative, at least from one man's perspective.

The Social- Theodore Dalrymple's Our Culture, What's Left of It is a relentlessly erudite, thoughtful and eye-opening attack on all the things ye olde 60's have wrought- unbridled sexuality, rampant drug use, poor grooming, bad art and just about anything else that a lack of restraint and the diminishing of standards breeds. You don't have to agree with the man to admire his work, which forces you to confront your lazy ass assumptions about freedom and responsibility. His piece on not legalizing drugs is the first essay to shed new light on that subject for me in ten years, and it is very difficult to combat. If the neocons had Dalrymple on their domestic team, the Left would be playing for even fewer scraps than they are now.