No Straight Road Takes You There - Rebecca Solnit

I heard about this author from a YouTube video. I took a long time to read as each essay offered thoughtful reflections on the current state of affairs.

Quotes:

"We are not infrequently Mysteries even to ourselves"

"Events, like living beings, have genealogies and evolutions and to know those means knowing who they are how they got there and who and what they're connected to"

[from the chapter "In Praise of the Meander"] "You're not trying to get somewhere else but to know better where you are".

"If you equate your wealth with virtue, you tend to equate poverty with vice."
"To be broken is to reach out, to be open, to be incomplete and therefore to welcome outside in."
"We are water walking toward the next drink"

Published: Read: January 2026 Genre: Philosophy

The Correspondent - Virginia Evans

 This book sets the New Year off to a great start.  I can't remember where I saw it recommended but I checked it out from the library and finished it off in a few evenings.  A wonderful read!

A 70ish woman has been writing letters to friends, acquaintances, neighbors and authors her whole life. We are taken through her later years as she shares her activities with her brother, her son and daughter, her long time friend and others.  The book is written as a series of letters or correspondence between her, the people in her life, and an unidentified person whose letter she's written for years but has yet to send.

Sybil Van Antwerp is stubborn and exacting in her life and her expectations of others. As the story unfolds, we learn she was adopted and when her children gift her a DNA kit it adds an unwelcome complication to her decisions.  Slowly and subtly, we learn more of her life, her loves and losses and witness her evolving into a wiser person who can till learn new lessons and change relationships.

This is a rich, rewarding story of a complex person and her striving to make the best of her life.  Highly recommended.

Quotes

[On her divorce] "When I play it all back I am ashamed and yet I cannot imagine having done any other thing. Grief shared, I think, can produce two outcomes.  Either you bind yourselves together and hold one for dear life, or you let go and up goes a wall too high to be crossed. For us it was the latter."

Published: 2025  Read: January 2026  Genre: Fiction

The Instrumentalist - Harriet Constable

 

This one was shared with me from my book club.  It's the story of Anna Maria della Pieta, a real life, violin virtuoso in the 17th century.  She was raised in a well known girl's orphanage in Venice that trained them to play instruments and had a world renowned orchestra which Anna Maria eventually ran until she died at 87 in the orphanage, having lived there her whole life. Her mentor was Vivaldi, the composer of the classical music composition, The Four Seasons. 

The author takes these facts and tells a tale of a virtuoso with the drive to become a maestro who sacrifices her relationships for a career that ultimately would not be allow to a woman.

I found the purse overly descriptive, flowery and difficult to get through as it didn't add to the story. 

Published:  2024  Read:  2026  Genre: Historical fiction

Last Seen - Judith Giesberg

 Sub-title: The enduring search by formerly enslaved people to find their lost families

As the sub-title indicates, this is the stories of people looking for family after the Civil War.  Through newspaper ads by formerly enslaved people, the author weaves their desperate attempts to find family sold off callously and indiscriminately by slave owners.  The anguish is palatable of having your children, spouse, siblings taken away as slave owners attempted to retain their "property", moving south and then east as the Union Army advanced. 

My eyes were opened to the estimated one million former slaves who escaped to join the Union army as refugees, migrating to the big cities  I'd never thought of the huge numbers displaced and desperately seeking to find their relatives.  The chaos of a war on our own soil was stark - the destruction and cruelty and disregard for other humans beings, two sides with totally different beliefs, one side overpowering the other. 

The author founded a website where the advertisements and newspapers that were searched and documented for these stories and the history of the times called "information wanted" (https://informationwanted.org/ ).  It's a resource for researching enslaved people in the 1860s.

This was a tough book to read but well worth the learning. 

Published: 2025  Read: January 2026  Genre: History