<\/p>\n
We might rarely get to see snowfall in Los Angeles, but logging onto social media in December means the arrival of a different kind of flurry. The one where our friends, both close and parasocial, excitedly share the year-end music-listening data dumps of their Spotify Wrapped<\/a>.<\/p>\n Spotify Wrapped only represents the culmination of our listening habits on a single music platform, but every shared Wrapped post seems to come with some self-evident clarity about our personal identity. Spotify Wrapped bares our souls and provides us the opportunity to see ourselves deconstructed via our musical inclinations. By most accounts, it\u2019s an irresistible delight. Oh, Spotify, you rascal, you\u2019ve got us pegged.<\/p>\n For anyone in Los Angeles, 2025 has been one hell of a year to get the Wrapped treatment. We\u2019re still processing the aftermath of the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires<\/a> \u2014 and haunted by ICE raids <\/a>and the federal administration\u2019s ceaseless attacks on California<\/a>. Not to mention Jimmy Kimmel getting silenced<\/a>.<\/p>\n Maybe it\u2019s not such a bad idea to take that temperature check.<\/p>\n But listening to music can be a passive experience \u2014 one enjoyed in tandem with folding laundry, or driving a car. To really learn about ourselves and how our year has been, we might want to turn elsewhere, to a habit with more intention. I\u2019m talking, of course, about reading.<\/p>\n While there\u2019s apps for tracking our reading habits, like StoryGraph or Goodreads, I\u2019m devoted to a wholly analogue tracking method that\u2019s helped me churn through books faster and with more intent than ever before: the book stack.<\/p>\n Starting every January, whenever I finish a book, I place it sidelong atop a shelf in the corner of my living room. With each new book I conquer, the stack gets taller, eventually becoming a full tower by December. A book stack, low on analytics, can\u2019t tell me the total number of pages I\u2019ve read, or how many minutes I spent reading, but it\u2019s a tangible monument to my year\u2019s reading progress. Its mere presence prods me into reading more. It calls me a chump when the stack is low and cheers for me when it reaches toward the ceiling.<\/p>\n My first book stack started in 2020, a wry joke to demonstrate the extra time we could all devote to reading books during a pandemic. The joke barely worked. I ended up reading just 19 books that year, only a few more than I had the previous year (though it could\u2019ve been more if one of those books wasn\u2019t \u201cCrime and Punishment\u201d).<\/p>\n Still, the book stack model gamified my reading habits and now I give books time I didn\u2019t feel I had before. I bring books to bars, movie theaters and the DMV. If ever I have to wait around somewhere, you better believe I\u2019ll come armed with a book.<\/p>\n The pandemic may have waned, but my book stack count continued to climb, peaking in 2023 after reading 52 books, averaging one per week.<\/p>\n But, hey, it\u2019s about quality, not quantity, right? If there\u2019s a quality to be gleaned from my 2025 book stack, you\u2019d see that I\u2019ve been looking for hot tips on how to survive times of extreme authoritarian rule. Some were more insightful than others.<\/p>\n In the stack was Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward\u2019s \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men,\u201d a landmark true story about two intrepid reporters who brought down the president of the United States by repeatedly bothering people at their homes for information. Fascinating as it is, it also feels like a relic from a time when doing something like that could still work. Philip Roth\u2019s \u201cThe Plot Against America\u201d tells the story of a Jewish New Jersey family in an alternate timeline where an \u201cAmerica First\u201d Charles Lindbergh beats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, ignoring the threat of Hitler in Europe and giving way to a rise in antisemitism at home. Roth paints a dreary portrait of how that scenario could have played out, but the horrors are resolved by something of a deus ex machina rather than by any one character\u2019s bold, heroic actions. Then there\u2019s Anthony Doerr\u2019s Pulitzer Prize-winning \u201cAll the Light We Cannot See,\u201d about the converging stories of a German boy enlisted in Hitler\u2019s army and a blind French girl during World War II. Sadly, this novel reads less like a book about living under fascist rule than a thirsty solicitation to become source material for Steven Spielberg\u2019s next movie.<\/p>\n Each of these titles have merit, but this year\u2019s book stack had two gems for anyone who wants to know how best to resist tyranny. Pointedly, there was Timothy Snyder\u2019s tidy pocket-sized handbook \u201cOn Tyranny\u201d filled with 20 short but fortifying chapters of practical wisdom like \u201cDo not obey in advance,\u201d \u201cDefend institutions\u201d and \u201cBelieve in truth.\u201d Each is applicable to our current moment, informed by historical precedent set by communist and fascist regimes of the past century. This book \u2014 well over a million copies <\/a>sold \u2014 came out at the start of Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Practical advice can also be found in great fiction, and on that front I found comfort and instruction in Hans Fallada\u2019s \u201cAlone in Berlin\u201d (a.k.a. \u201cEvery Man Dies Alone\u201d), based on the true story of a married couple living in Berlin during World War II who wrote postcards urging resistance against the Nazi regime and secretly planted them in public places for random people to discover. Under their extreme political conditions, this small act of civil disobedience means risking death. Not only is the story riveting, there\u2019s also great pleasure in seeing the mayhem each postcard causes and how effective they are at exposing the subordinate class of fascists for what they truly are: nitwits.<\/p>\n Also notable in \u201cAlone in Berlin\u201d is the point of view of both the author and his fictional heroes. Neither a target of persecution, nor a military adversary, Fallada nevertheless endured the amplified hardships of living under Nazi rule during World War II. His trauma was still fresh while writing this book and it\u2019s evident in his prose. He survived just long enough to write and publish \u201cAlone in Berlin\u201d before dying in 1947 at the age of 53.<\/p>\n If I\u2019ve learned anything from these books, it\u2019s that it\u2019s in our best interest to not be afraid. Tyrants feed on fear and expect it. A citizenry without fear is much harder to control. That\u2019s why we need to raise our voices against provocations of our rights, always push back, declare wrong things to be wrong, get in the way, annoy the opposition, and allow yourself to devote time to do things for your own enjoyment.<\/p>\n And in that spirit, my book stack also includes a fair amount of palate cleansers in the mix: Jena Friedman\u2019s \u201cNot Funny,\u201d short stories by Nikolai Gogol, Jhumpa Lahiri\u2019s \u201cThe Namesake\u201d (whose main character is named after<\/i> Gogol), and a pair of Kurt Vonnegut novels. Though it\u2019s hard to read Vonnegut without stumbling upon some apropos nuggets of wisdom, like this one from his novel \u201cSlapstick:\u201d \u201cFascists are inferior people who believe it when somebody tells them they\u2019re superior.\u201d<\/p>\n