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We’d not often get to see snowfall in Los Angeles, however logging onto social media in December means the arrival of a distinct form of flurry. The one the place our buddies, each shut and parasocial, excitedly share the year-end music-listening information dumps of their Spotify Wrapped.
Spotify Wrapped solely represents the fruits of our listening habits on a single music platform, however each shared Wrapped submit appears to return 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 received us pegged.
For anybody in Los Angeles, 2025 has been one hell of a 12 months to get the Wrapped remedy. 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 could be a passive expertise — one loved in tandem with folding laundry, or driving a automotive. To actually find out about 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 via books quicker and with extra intent than ever earlier than: the ebook stack.
Beginning each January, each time I end a ebook, I place it sidelong atop a shelf within the nook of my front room. With every new ebook I conquer, the stack will get taller, finally changing into a full tower by December. A ebook stack, low on analytics, can’t inform me the entire variety of pages I’ve learn, or what number of minutes I spent studying, nevertheless it’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 ebook stack began in 2020, a wry joke to show the additional time we may all commit to studying books throughout a pandemic. The joke barely labored. I ended up studying simply 19 books that 12 months, only some greater than I had the earlier 12 months (although it may’ve been extra if a kind of books wasn’t “Crime and Punishment”).
Nonetheless, the ebook stack mannequin gamified my studying habits and now I give books time I didn’t really feel I had earlier than. I carry books to bars, film theaters and the DMV. If ever I’ve to attend round someplace, you higher imagine I’ll come armed with a ebook.
The pandemic might have waned, however my ebook stack depend 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 ebook stack, you’d see that I’ve been on the lookout for sizzling recommendations on how you can survive occasions of maximum authoritarian rule. Some have been extra insightful than others.
Within the stack was Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s “All the President’s Men,” a landmark true story about two intrepid reporters who introduced down the president of the US by repeatedly bothering folks at their properties for data. Fascinating as it’s, it additionally appears like a relic from a time when doing one thing like that might nonetheless work. Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against 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 approach to an increase in antisemitism at residence. Roth paints a dreary portrait of how that state of affairs may have performed out, however the horrors are resolved by one thing of a deus ex machina fairly than by anybody character’s daring, heroic actions. Then there’s Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “All the Light We Cannot See,” concerning the converging tales of a German boy enlisted in Hitler’s military and a blind French woman throughout World Conflict II. Sadly, this novel reads much less like a ebook about residing below fascist rule than a thirsty solicitation to turn into supply materials for Steven Spielberg’s subsequent film.
Every of those titles have advantage, however this 12 months’s ebook stack had two gems for anybody who needs to understand how 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 “Do not obey in advance,” “Defend institutions” and “Believe in truth.” Every is relevant to our present second, knowledgeable by historic precedent set by communist and fascist regimes of the previous century. This ebook — nicely over 1,000,000 copies offered — got here out in the beginning of Trump’s first time period in 2017, so I got here a bit of late to this get together. 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.okay.a. “Every Man Dies Alone”), based mostly on the true story of a married couple residing in Berlin throughout World Conflict II who wrote postcards urging resistance in opposition to the Nazi regime and secretly planted them in public locations for random folks to find. Below their excessive political circumstances, this small act of civil disobedience means risking dying. 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 honestly are: nitwits.
Additionally notable in “Alone in Berlin” is the standpoint of each the creator and his fictional heroes. Neither a goal of persecution, nor a army adversary, Fallada however endured the amplified hardships of residing below Nazi rule throughout World Conflict II. His trauma was nonetheless recent whereas scripting this ebook and it’s evident in his prose. He survived simply lengthy sufficient to put in writing and publish “Alone in Berlin” earlier than dying in 1947 on the age of 53.
If I’ve discovered something from these books, it’s that it’s in our greatest curiosity to not be afraid. Tyrants feed on concern and anticipate it. A citizenry with out concern is way more durable to manage. That’s why we have to elevate our voices in opposition to provocations of our rights, all the time push again, declare fallacious issues to be fallacious, get in the way in which, annoy the opposition, and permit your self to commit time to do issues in your personal enjoyment.
And in that spirit, my ebook stack additionally features a honest quantity of palate cleansers within the combine: Jena Friedman’s “Not Funny,” quick tales by Nikolai Gogol, Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake” (whose major character is known as after Gogol), and a pair of Kurt Vonnegut novels. Although it’s onerous to learn Vonnegut with out stumbling upon some apropos nuggets of knowledge, like this one from his novel “Slapstick:” “Fascists are inferior people who believe it when somebody 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.
