Books Every Joy-Seeking Woman Needs to Read

When Sankovitch finds a packet of 100-year-old letters in her backyard, some of them dating back to the Civil War, she uses the discovery to examine the lost art of writing letters—why we do it and how to do it, now that we live in the age of email and Twitter. Be it love missives, bread-and-butter thank you’s, condolences or childhood notes home from camp, “Letters are the history of our lives made solid,” she writes. Part memoir, part meditation, part artful history lesson (that ranges from Ciecero to Gertrude Stein to Thomas Merton) and part reminder to put a pen to paper when it comes to the people we care about, in the sincerest of ways.