There is noting like a holiday weekend to help you get caught up on some reading. If you're looking for something new to dive into in between the fireworks, parades, and barbecues, these four books are all worth dedicating some time and attention to.

All four titles are available online and on local bookshop shelves today. Interested in buying multiple copies for your team, book club, or employee resource group? Follow the links below or give us a call to purchase the books, or check out our services for bulk book buyers to learn more about how we can help.

Unless otherwise noted, all descriptions of the books below come from the publisher.

Invested: Trust and Ignorance in a Middle-Class Fraud by Camilo Arturo Leslie, published by Stanford University Press

A riveting and revealing new account of the precarity of the middle class today.

To be middle class today connotes a certain prudence when it comes to financial decision-making—steadily building one's nest egg rather than carelessly spending. Constantly enjoined to put their savings to work in shrewd investments, these subjects must constantly guard their class status. In Invested Camilo Leslie contends that these pressures require middle-class adults to engage professionals, experts, brokers, and organizations for help in financializing their futures. These pivotal relationships that comprise the middle class experience cannot be grasped without an account of trust, and, in this case, its betrayal.

Leslie takes the case of the Stanford Financial Group (SFG)—the second largest Ponzi scheme on record—to explore the vulnerability built into middle classness. The Stanford fraud stands out for its twenty-three-year length, its complex structure, and its geographic breadth, ensnaring victims across the Americas, including this book's focal populations: investors in Venezuela and the United States. Victims of the scheme were invariably members of the middle class, with sufficient investable funds to participate. The book's comparative approach reveals how middle classness is made and manifested differently in distinct settings. Tracing SFG's arc in Venezuela and the U.S. reveals the weight of local political and institutional contexts on middle-class subjects' propensity to trust.

Drawing on interviews with investors, ex-employees of SFG, and a range of professionals with ties to the case, Leslie tells a compelling, often poignant story of an unwieldy category. To be middle-class, he shows, is to occupy not just a material location but a moral and epistemic one in which class members are obliged to trust from a place of ignorance.

Making Sense of Life: Develop Your Own Theory for Happiness and Achievement by Simin Cai, with Mikaela Ashcroft, published by Forbes Books

Why are we here? What makes a life well-lived? And how can we know what matters—truly—for ourselves?

In Making Sense of Life, physics PhD and entrepreneur Dr. Simin Cai presents a rational, structured approach to life’s biggest questions. Drawing from science, philosophy, and personal experience, he helps readers develop their own “theory of life”—a consistent, personal framework for happiness, clarity, and fulfillment.

Instead of offering one-size-fits-all answers, Cai encourages readers to ask better questions: What do I value? What assumptions shape my thinking? How can I define a life worth living for me?

With examples across youth, adulthood, and elderhood, Making Sense of Life is an honest, intelligent alternative to superficial self-help. It’s for readers who want depth over hype, logic over slogans, and a framework that evolves with them. It’s a must-read for anyone who values reason, clarity, and practical insight over feel-good slogans.

On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear by Julia Angwin & Ami Fields-Meyer, published by Mariner Books

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and a former White House senior advisor, a deeply reported manual about how anyone can defy an authoritarian—based on original interviews with more than 100 dissidents, activists, and theorists across the world.

The United States is only the latest country to face a leader who wields fear as a weapon, punishes political enemies, disappears people off the street, and undermines free and fair elections. Today nearly three out of four people on earth live under authoritarianism, the highest rate since the late 1970s.

But even under repressive conditions, each of us holds the power to help defeat autocrats. Based on their acclaimed The New Yorker essay “So You Want to Be a Dissident?,” veteran reporter Julia Angwin and political strategist Ami Fields-Meyer give us a captivating—and profoundly hopeful—guide to courage in an age of fear.

Meet a student from Hong Kong who risked everything for democracy. A mom in a working-class neighborhood of Caracas who broke with the political movement that raised her. Cairo twentysomethings who staged a gutsy stunt to help bring down a dictator. A mild-mannered immigrant fighting to save a landmark U.S. civil rights law. People throughout the United States and across five continents who faced serious risks for dissenting in their workplace, their community, or their country. On Courage is the story of how they did it anyway—and how you can do it, too.

Blending rich, previously untold narratives with history, spirituality, and movement research, Angwin and Fields-Meyer deliver a highly accessible book full of practical lessons—an inspiring resource for anyone, anywhere, who feel the walls of history closing in on them. On Courage is a roadmap to political courage and a powerful case for how taking personal risks can help save the free world.

Tools for Life: 10 Essential Therapy Skills Everyone Should Know by Kirren Schnack, published by Bluebird

Discover the ten essential tools for a happy, healthy life with Oxford trained clinical psychologist and TikTok star Dr Kirren.

Hi, how are you?

How often do you genuinely pause to listen to the real answer for yourself?

Beyond that polite reply, what's the deeper conversation happening silently inside your own head every single day—what do you hear? The cost of settling for less isn’t just unhappiness; it’s the erosion of your life—the life you deserve to live on your own terms.

Find your way back to the life you truly want with Tools for Life Dr. Kirren’s ten essential therapeutic tools that everyone should know. Discover: How you see yourself How to be who you want to be How you stop fearing rejection How to protect your peace with boundaries How to be assertive How you stop people-pleasing How you handle conflict How you let go of compassion How to protect yourself from toxic behavior How to heal from pain caused by others Inspired by her experience with more than two decades working and practicing as an Oxford trained and registered clinical psychologist, these concise but powerful tools reveal how to ditch harmful behavioral and thought patterns and find the courage to live authentically. Find out how to pursue your goals in alignment with your values and break free from old patterns, set healthy boundaries and become an assertive advocate for yourself.