Your book stack knows you best

Forget Spotify Wrapped. Reading helps us navigate our reality in this city.

- ZACHARY BERNSTEIN

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.

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’s an irresistible delight. Oh, Spotify, you rascal, you've got us pegged.

For anyone in Los Angeles, 2025 has been one hell of a year to get the Wrapped treatment. We're still processing the aftermath of the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires — and haunted by ICE raids and the federal administration’s ceaseless attacks on California. Not to mention Jimmy Kimmel getting silenced.

Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to take that temperature check.

But listening to music can be a passive experience — 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'm talking, of course, about reading.

While there's apps for tracking our reading habits, like Story Graph or Goodreads, I'm devoted to a wholly analogue tracking method that’s helped me churn through books faster and with more intent than ever before: the book stack.