Essay: Forget Spotify Wrapped, your book stack knows exactly who you are

We mightiness seldom get to spot snowfall successful Los Angeles, but logging onto societal media successful December means the accomplishment of a antithetic benignant of flurry. The 1 wherever our friends, some adjacent and parasocial, excitedly stock the year-end music-listening information dumps of their Spotify Wrapped.

Spotify Wrapped lone represents the culmination of our listening habits connected a azygous euphony platform, but each shared Wrapped station seems to travel with immoderate self-evident clarity astir our idiosyncratic identity. Spotify Wrapped bares our souls and provides america the accidental to spot ourselves deconstructed via our philharmonic inclinations. By astir accounts, it’s an irresistible delight. Oh, Spotify, you rascal, you’ve got america pegged.

For anyone successful Los Angeles, 2025 has been 1 hellhole of a twelvemonth to get the Wrapped treatment. We’re inactive processing the aftermath of the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires — and haunted by ICE raids and the national administration’s ceaseless attacks connected California. Not to notation Jimmy Kimmel getting silenced.

Maybe it’s not specified a atrocious thought to instrumentality that somesthesia check.

But listening to euphony tin beryllium a passive acquisition — 1 enjoyed successful tandem with folding laundry, oregon driving a car. To truly larn astir ourselves and however our twelvemonth has been, we mightiness privation to crook elsewhere, to a wont with much intention. I’m talking, of course, astir reading.

While there’s apps for tracking our speechmaking habits, similar StoryGraph oregon Goodreads, I’m devoted to a wholly analogue tracking method that’s helped maine churn done books faster and with much intent than ever before: the publication stack.

Starting each January, whenever I decorativeness a book, I spot it sidelong atop a support successful the country of my surviving room. With each caller publication I conquer, the stack gets taller, yet becoming a afloat operation by December. A publication stack, debased connected analytics, can’t archer maine the full fig of pages I’ve read, oregon however galore minutes I spent reading, but it’s a tangible monument to my year’s speechmaking progress. Its specified beingness prods maine into speechmaking more. It calls maine a chump erstwhile the stack is debased and cheers for maine erstwhile it reaches toward the ceiling.

My archetypal publication stack started successful 2020, a wry gag to show the other clip we could each give to speechmaking books during a pandemic. The gag hardly worked. I ended up speechmaking conscionable 19 books that year, lone a fewer much than I had the erstwhile twelvemonth (though it could’ve been much if 1 of those books wasn’t “Crime and Punishment”).

Still, the publication stack exemplary gamified my speechmaking habits and present I springiness books clip I didn’t consciousness I had before. I bring books to bars, movie theaters and the DMV. If ever I person to hold astir somewhere, you amended judge I’ll travel equipped with a book.

The pandemic whitethorn person waned, but my publication stack number continued to climb, peaking successful 2023 aft speechmaking 52 books, averaging 1 per week.

But, hey, it’s astir quality, not quantity, right? If there’s a prime to beryllium gleaned from my 2025 publication stack, you’d spot that I’ve been looking for blistery tips connected however to past times of utmost authoritarian rule. Some were much insightful than others.

In the stack was Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s “All the President’s Men,” a landmark existent communicative astir 2 intrepid reporters who brought down the president of the United States by repeatedly bothering radical astatine their homes for information. Fascinating arsenic it is, it besides feels similar a relic from a clip erstwhile doing thing similar that could inactive work. Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” tells the communicative of a Jewish New Jersey household successful an alternate timeline wherever an “America First” Charles Lindbergh beats Franklin Roosevelt successful the 1940 statesmanlike election, ignoring the menace of Hitler successful Europe and giving mode to a emergence successful antisemitism astatine home. Roth paints a dreary representation of however that script could person played out, but the horrors are resolved by thing of a deus ex machina alternatively than by immoderate 1 character’s bold, heroic actions. Then there’s Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “All the Light We Cannot See,” astir the converging stories of a German lad enlisted successful Hitler’s service and a unsighted French miss during World War II. Sadly, this caller reads little similar a publication astir surviving nether fascist regularisation than a thirsty solicitation to go root worldly for Steven Spielberg’s adjacent movie.

Each of these titles person merit, but this year’s publication stack had 2 gems for anyone who wants to cognize however champion to defy tyranny. Pointedly, determination was Timothy Snyder’s tidy pocket-sized handbook “On Tyranny” filled with 20 abbreviated but fortifying chapters of applicable contented similar “Do not obey successful advance,” “Defend institutions” and “Believe successful truth.” Each is applicable to our existent moment, informed by humanities precedent acceptable by communist and fascist regimes of the past century. This publication — good implicit a cardinal copies sold — came retired astatine the commencement of Trump’s archetypal word successful 2017, truthful I came a small precocious to this party. The information that Snyder himself moved to Canada this twelvemonth should springiness america each pause.

Practical proposal tin besides beryllium recovered successful large fiction, and connected that beforehand I recovered comfortableness and acquisition successful Hans Fallada’s “Alone successful Berlin” (a.k.a. “Every Man Dies Alone”), based connected the existent communicative of a joined mates surviving successful Berlin during World War II who wrote postcards urging absorption against the Nazi authorities and secretly planted them successful nationalist places for random radical to discover. Under their utmost governmental conditions, this tiny enactment of civilian disobedience means risking death. Not lone is the communicative riveting, there’s besides large pleasance successful seeing the mayhem each postcard causes and however effectual they are astatine exposing the subordinate people of fascists for what they genuinely are: nitwits.

Also notable successful “Alone successful Berlin” is the constituent of presumption of some the writer and his fictional heroes. Neither a people of persecution, nor a subject adversary, Fallada nevertheless endured the amplified hardships of surviving nether Nazi regularisation during World War II. His trauma was inactive caller portion penning this publication and it’s evident successful his prose. He survived conscionable agelong capable to constitute and people “Alone successful Berlin” earlier dying successful 1947 astatine the property of 53.

If I’ve learned thing from these books, it’s that it’s successful our champion involvement to not beryllium afraid. Tyrants provender connected fearfulness and expect it. A citizenry without fearfulness is overmuch harder to control. That’s wherefore we request to rise our voices against provocations of our rights, ever propulsion back, state incorrect things to beryllium wrong, get successful the way, annoy the opposition, and let yourself to give clip to bash things for your ain enjoyment.

And successful that spirit, my publication stack besides includes a just magnitude of palate cleansers successful the mix: Jena Friedman’s “Not Funny,” abbreviated stories by Nikolai Gogol, Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake” (whose main quality is named after Gogol), and a brace of Kurt Vonnegut novels. Though it’s hard to work Vonnegut without stumbling upon immoderate apropos nuggets of wisdom, similar this 1 from his caller “Slapstick:” “Fascists are inferior radical who judge it erstwhile idiosyncratic tells them they’re superior.”

Zachary Bernstein is a writer, exertion and songwriter. He’s moving connected his debut caller astir a poorly managed distant land society.