Finding Company in the Pages: The Stories That Sustained Me in 2025

15 hours ago7 min read

I have a confession: I am a holiday season grinch. The pressure of gifts, the relentless soundtrack of festive music, and the clashing palette of red and green fill me with a peculiar melancholy.Yet, the New Year is different. I see it as a true beginning—a pristine starting line.As 2025 closed, I sought my annual refuge not in resolutions or parties, but within the pages of books. These stories became my life raft, navigating the reflective and often turbulent waters of year's end.My literary companions were not chart-toppers but stumbled-upon treasures, gifts, and revisited old friends, each reflecting a facet of humanity I needed to recall. There was a worn novel about a Lisbon archivist, whose quiet life cataloging histories became a profound meditation on memory.Reading it in the early winter dark felt like a dialogue with solitude, honoring the quiet we often ignore. As a vibrant counterpoint, I immersed myself in a chaotic, multi-generational Mumbai family saga.My silent apartment seemed to thrum with its noise of arguments, spices, and tangled love—a glorious reminder of the messy reality of human connection. A teacher friend, re-reading children's classics, shared a vital truth: 'Stories don’t give answers, they give company.' That crystallized it. The biography of a polar explorer offered the company of stark endurance.Mary Oliver's poetry provided the company of gentle, focused attention on the natural world. A sharp essay collection delivered the company of righteous anger, which proved clarifying.Together, they formed an advisory committee in my mind, debating how to live. This was not escapism, but reinforcement.The narratives we absorb build scaffolding for our own. A masterful sentence can mend a sense of fragmentation; a perfectly observed detail in a story can anchor us when the world feels vast.As the year turned, I considered our timeless human ritual—from ancient firesides to modern podcasts—of weaving life's raw data into narratives for sense-making. My personal 2025 canon did that work.It carried the weight of the year's quiet disappointments and unexpected joys, reframing them not as isolated events, but as part of an ongoing story. So, I step into 2026 not with a list of goals, but with a stack of books on my nightstand, passages underlined, and a reaffirmed belief in our oldest technology for navigating time: telling each other what it felt like to live through it.

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