We may rarely see snowfall in Los Angeles, but logging onto social media in December means a different type of snowfall is coming. The one where our friends, both intimate and parasocial, excitedly share year-end music listening data dumps from their Spotify wrapped.
Spotify Wrapped represents just the culmination of our listening habits on one music platform, but every shared Wrapped post seems to contain some self-evident clarity about our personal identity. Spotify Wrapped bares our souls and gives us the opportunity to see ourselves deconstructed through our musical inclinations. According to most, it is an irresistible pleasure. Oh, Spotify, you scoundrel, you've tied us down.
For anyone in Los Angeles, 2025 was a damn bad year to get Wrapped treatment. We are still experiencing the consequences of the devastating Fires in Eaton and Palisades – and persecuted ICE raids and the federal administration continuous attacks on California. Not to mention Jimmy Kimmel silenced.
It might not be such a bad idea to check the temperature.
But listening to music can be a passive activity that can be enjoyed while folding laundry or driving a car. To truly learn about ourselves and how our year has gone, we may want to turn to something different, a more focused habit. I'm talking, of course, about reading.
While there are apps to track our reading habits, like StoryGraph or Goodreads, I prefer an all-analog tracking method that has helped me review books faster and with more purpose than ever before: the book stack.
Starting in January, when I finish a book, I put it sideways on a shelf in the corner of the living room. With each new book I conquer, the stack gets taller and eventually becomes a full tower by December. A stack of low analytics books can't tell me the total number of pages I read or how many minutes I spent reading, but it is a tangible monument to my reading progress over the year. His presence alone motivates me to read further. He calls me a fool when the stack is low and greets me when it reaches the ceiling.
My first stack of books started in 2020, a tongue-in-cheek joke meant to demonstrate the extra time we can all dedicate to reading books during the pandemic. The joke barely worked. I ended up reading a total of 19 books that year, only a few more than the previous year (although it could have been more if one of those books hadn't been Crime and Punishment).
However, the book stack model has gamified my reading habits, and I now dedicate time to books that I didn't have before. I bring books to bars, movie theaters, and the DMV. If I ever have to wait somewhere, believe me, I will come with a book.
The pandemic may have subsided, but my book count continued to rise, peaking in 2023 after reading 52 books, an average of one per week.
But hey, it's about quality, not quantity, right? If there's anything to take away from my 2025 stack of books, you'll see that I was looking for useful tips on how to survive under extreme authoritarian rule. Some were more insightful than others.
In the stack was Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's All the President's Men, the remarkable true story of two intrepid reporters who brought down the President of the United States by repeatedly harassing people in their homes for information. As exciting as it is, it also feels like a relic from a time when something like this could still work. Philip Roth's The Plot Against America tells the story of a New Jersey Jewish family in an alternate timeline where “America First” Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, ignoring the threat of Hitler in Europe and giving way to rising anti-Semitism at home. Roth paints a grim picture of how this scenario could have played out, but the horrors are resolved through something of a deus ex machina rather than brave, heroic actions by any character. There's also Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Can't See, about the converging stories of a German boy enlisted in Hitler's army and a blind French girl during World War II. Unfortunately, this novel reads less like a book about life under fascist rule and more like a yearning bid to become source material for Steven Spielberg's next film.
Each of these titles has its merits, but there are two gems in this year's stack of books for anyone who wants to know how best to stand up to tyranny. Notably, there was Timothy Snyder's neat pocket guide, On Tyranny, filled with 20 short but empowering chapters of practical wisdom such as “Don't Pre-Conform,” “Defend Institutions,” and “Believe the Truth.” Each of them applies to our current moment, based on the historical precedent created by the communist and fascist regimes of the last century. This book is well over a million copies sold out – came out early in Trump's first term in 2017, so I came a little late to this party. The fact that Snyder himself moved to Canada this year should give us all pause.
Practical advice can also be found in great fiction, and in this regard I found solace and guidance in Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin (also known as Every Man Dies Alone), based on the true story of a couple living in Berlin during World War II who wrote postcards calling for resistance to the Nazi regime and secretly dropped them in public places for random people to discover. In their extreme political climate, this small act of civil disobedience means risking death. Not only is the story engrossing, but it's also very satisfying to see the chaos each postcard causes and how effectively they expose the subordinate class of fascists for what they truly are: assholes.
Also noteworthy in Alone in Berlin is the point of view of both the author and his fictional characters. Although neither persecuted nor a military enemy, Fallada nevertheless endured the increased hardships of life under Nazi rule during World War II. At the time of writing this book, his trauma was still fresh, and it shows in his prose. He lived long enough to write and publish Alone in Berlin before dying in 1947 at the age of 53.
If I learned anything from these books, it is that it is in our best interest not to be afraid. Tyrants feed on fear and expect it. It is much more difficult to control citizens devoid of fear. This is why we need to raise our voices against provocations of our rights, always resist, declare wrong things wrong, interfere, irritate the opposition and allow ourselves to devote time to activities for our own pleasure.
And in that spirit, my book stack also includes a fair amount of palate cleansers: Jena Friedman's Not Funny, Nikolai Gogol's stories, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (whose main character is named after Gogol) and a couple of novels by Kurt Vonnegut. Although it's hard to read Vonnegut without coming across some nuggets of wisdom, such as from his novel Farce: “Fascists are inferior people who believe when someone tells them they are superior.”
Zachary Bernstein writer, editor and songwriter. He is working on his debut novel about a poorly governed society on a remote island.
