We’d hardly ever get to see snowfall in Los Angeles, however logging onto social media in December means the arrival of a unique sort of flurry. The one the place our mates, each shut and parasocial, excitedly share the year-end music-listening information dumps of their Spotify Wrapped.
Spotify Wrapped solely represents the end result of our listening habits on a single music platform, however each shared Wrapped put up appears to come back with some self-evident readability about our private id. Spotify Wrapped bares our souls and offers us the chance to see ourselves deconstructed by way of our musical inclinations. By most accounts, it’s an irresistible delight. Oh, Spotify, you rascal, you’ve bought us pegged.
For anybody in Los Angeles, 2025 has been one hell of a 12 months to get the Wrapped therapy. We’re nonetheless processing the aftermath of the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires — and haunted by ICE raids and the federal administration’s ceaseless assaults on California. To not point out Jimmy Kimmel getting silenced.
Perhaps it’s not such a nasty thought to take that temperature verify.
However listening to music generally is a passive expertise — one loved in tandem with folding laundry, or driving a automobile. To essentially study ourselves and the way our 12 months has been, we would wish to flip elsewhere, to a behavior with extra intention. I’m speaking, in fact, about studying.
Whereas there’s apps for monitoring our studying habits, like StoryGraph or Goodreads, I’m dedicated to an entirely analogue monitoring technique that’s helped me churn by means of books quicker and with extra intent than ever earlier than: the guide stack.
Beginning each January, at any time when I end a guide, I place it sidelong atop a shelf within the nook of my front room. With every new guide I conquer, the stack will get taller, finally turning into a full tower by December. A guide stack, low on analytics, can’t inform me the full variety of pages I’ve learn, or what number of minutes I spent studying, but it surely’s a tangible monument to my 12 months’s studying progress. Its mere presence prods me into studying extra. It calls me a chump when the stack is low and cheers for me when it reaches towards the ceiling.
My first guide stack began in 2020, a wry joke to reveal the additional time we might all dedicate to studying books throughout a pandemic. The joke barely labored. I ended up studying simply 19 books that 12 months, just a few greater than I had the earlier 12 months (although it might’ve been extra if a kind of books wasn’t “Crime and Punishment”).
Nonetheless, the guide stack mannequin gamified my studying habits and now I give books time I didn’t really feel I had earlier than. I convey books to bars, film theaters and the DMV. If ever I’ve to attend round someplace, you higher consider I’ll come armed with a guide.
The pandemic might have waned, however my guide stack rely continued to climb, peaking in 2023 after studying 52 books, averaging one per week.
However, hey, it’s about high quality, not amount, proper? If there’s a high quality to be gleaned from my 2025 guide stack, you’d see that I’ve been on the lookout for sizzling tips about easy methods to survive occasions of maximum authoritarian rule. Some had been extra insightful than others.
Within the stack was Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s “All of the President’s Males,” a landmark true story about two intrepid reporters who introduced down the president of america by repeatedly bothering individuals at their houses for data. Fascinating as it’s, it additionally seems like a relic from a time when doing one thing like that would nonetheless work. Philip Roth’s “The Plot In opposition to America” tells the story of a Jewish New Jersey household in an alternate timeline the place an “America First” Charles Lindbergh beats Franklin Roosevelt within the 1940 presidential election, ignoring the specter of Hitler in Europe and giving method to an increase in antisemitism at residence. Roth paints a dreary portrait of how that situation might have performed out, however the horrors are resolved by one thing of a deus ex machina quite than by anybody character’s daring, heroic actions. Then there’s Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “All of the Mild We Can not See,” in regards to the converging tales of a German boy enlisted in Hitler’s military and a blind French woman throughout World Battle II. Sadly, this novel reads much less like a guide about residing beneath fascist rule than a thirsty solicitation to turn out to be supply materials for Steven Spielberg’s subsequent film.
Every of those titles have advantage, however this 12 months’s guide stack had two gems for anybody who needs to know the way greatest to withstand tyranny. Pointedly, there was Timothy Snyder’s tidy pocket-sized handbook “On Tyranny” full of 20 quick however fortifying chapters of sensible knowledge like “Don’t obey upfront,” “Defend establishments” and “Imagine in reality.” Every is relevant to our present second, knowledgeable by historic precedent set by communist and fascist regimes of the previous century. This guide — effectively over one million copies offered — got here out at first of Trump’s first time period in 2017, so I got here a little bit late to this social gathering. The truth that Snyder himself moved to Canada this 12 months ought to give us all pause.
Sensible recommendation will also be present in nice fiction, and on that entrance I discovered consolation and instruction in Hans Fallada’s “Alone in Berlin” (a.ok.a. “Each Man Dies Alone”), primarily based on the true story of a married couple residing in Berlin throughout World Battle II who wrote postcards urging resistance towards the Nazi regime and secretly planted them in public locations for random individuals to find. Underneath their excessive political situations, this small act of civil disobedience means risking loss of life. Not solely is the story riveting, there’s additionally nice pleasure in seeing the mayhem every postcard causes and the way efficient they’re at exposing the subordinate class of fascists for what they really are: nitwits.
Additionally notable in “Alone in Berlin” is the viewpoint of each the writer and his fictional heroes. Neither a goal of persecution, nor a army adversary, Fallada however endured the amplified hardships of residing beneath Nazi rule throughout World Battle II. His trauma was nonetheless contemporary whereas scripting this guide and it’s evident in his prose. He survived simply lengthy sufficient to write down and publish “Alone in Berlin” earlier than dying in 1947 on the age of 53.
If I’ve realized something from these books, it’s that it’s in our greatest curiosity to not be afraid. Tyrants feed on concern and count on it. A citizenry with out concern is far tougher to manage. That’s why we have to increase our voices towards provocations of our rights, at all times push again, declare improper issues to be improper, get in the way in which, annoy the opposition, and permit your self to dedicate time to do issues to your personal enjoyment.
And in that spirit, my guide stack additionally features a honest quantity of palate cleansers within the combine: Jena Friedman’s “Not Humorous,” quick tales by Nikolai Gogol, Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake” (whose primary character is called after Gogol), and a pair of Kurt Vonnegut novels. Although it’s laborious to learn Vonnegut with out stumbling upon some apropos nuggets of knowledge, like this one from his novel “Slapstick:” “Fascists are inferior individuals who consider it when any person tells them they’re superior.”
Zachary Bernstein is a author, editor and songwriter. He’s engaged on his debut novel a couple of poorly managed distant island society.
