I don't know about you, but the news cycle has been sucking me in and dragging me down lately. Whenever that happens, I know I need to change up my media diet, consume less of the fast food the 24-hour news cycle serves up on our phones and other screens, and turn to a slower and healthier information diet by digging into a good book. It helps if that book helps us remember our individual agency in the world, as all of the books we're recommending this week do.

All four titles are available online and hitting bookshop shelves today. Unless otherwise noted, all descriptions of the books below come from the publisher.

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.

In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive by Leidy Klotz, published by Little, Brown Spark

An invitation to bridge our mental and physical worlds, this essential guide gives you the tools to understand how space influences mindset. From home to work and everywhere in between, learn how to put yourself in a better place.

So many books address how to live a good life. This one is about where.

Immersing readers in locations from beach huts to modern office layouts, from the backyard where we once played to the college dorm where we forged lifelong bonds, behavioral scientist Leidy Klotz illuminates how our physical environment determines our habits, our relationships, and even who we are. And how consciously connecting with our physical spaces can increase our mental wellness and combat screen fatigue.

Readers also learn:

• How physical spaces build the very skills our screens erode
  
• Which easy design changes maximize social connection
  
• How to perform as well in neutral territory as we do on our "home turf"
  
• Why some office layouts invite conversation and others kill it
  
• How navigating a new place primes your brain for learning
  
• What physical spaces teach us about drawing emotional boundaries 
  
• How physical places can keep memories alive
  
• And much more

Through practical wisdom and small shifts, Klotz demonstrates how to take back agency and re-design spaces so we can thrive.

Selling Opportunity: The Story of Mary Kay by Mary Lisa Gavenas, published by Viking

The only woman in Forbes’ Greatest Business Stories of All Time and the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange, Mary Kay Ash has a life story that reads like a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel.

Growing up in Depression-era Texas, Mary Kathlyn Wagner is a dutiful daughter and diligent student with ambition aplenty and no place to use it. Married at sixteen, she is a grandmother at thirty-four. When she is not cooking or cleaning or taking care of the kids, she peddles cleaning products to other housewives. The work has no salary and no security but she sticks with it, sure that direct selling will make her dreams come true.

In 1963, after she has been divorced three times and widowed twice, she sets up her own company, selling second chance and self-invention for the price of a skin care showcase. Soon millions know her as the little lady in the big wig who gives away pink Cadillacs. From its unpromising start in a 500-square-foot Dallas storefront, Mary Kay Inc. grows into a global phenomenon with 3.5 million reps in over 35 countries. She becomes the most famous saleswoman in the world. Maybe the most famous ever.

Based on fifteen years of research, Selling Opportunity gives us a page-turning rags-to-riches story set against the background of direct selling in all its overstated, over-the-top glory. Here, for the first time, is the definitive history of a peculiarly American industry and a mid-century mindset that ennobled extreme self-reliance, sticking to your guns, and blind faith in the American dream.

What's the Point? Turning Purpose Into Your Daily Superpower by Tom Rath, published by Silicon Guild

Is everything you've been taught about finding fulfillment wrong?

For decades, you've been told to follow your passion, find your purpose, chase happiness. It's bad advice, and somewhere inside you already know it. You're still searching, still waiting, still wondering why work feels hollow even when you're doing everything right. In an age when AI can do your job faster and cheaper, the old playbook isn't just outdated; it's a trap.

The people who live the most meaningful lives don’t find fulfillment within themselves. They stop looking inward. Entirely.

In his most personal and provocative book yet, #1 New York Times bestselling author Tom Rath—whose books from How Full Is Your Bucket? to StrengthsFinder 2.0 and Eat Move Sleep have shaped a generation—reveals that your daily superpower isn't your title, your salary, or your "brand." It's your ability to contribute to others. And it’s the one skill artificial intelligence cannot replicate.

Drawing from the clarity of a man who's lived on borrowed time since a terminal diagnosis at age fifteen, Rath combines the rigor of a researcher with the candor of a friend who refuses to let you settle. You'll discover why passion is overrated, why your childhood dreams may be holding you back, and how to build work that outlasts you.

Purpose isn't something you find. It's something you build every day, during every meeting, throughout every task, guided by one defining question: What's the point?

This book is not for the weak-hearted. It's a direct challenge to stop sleepwalking through your career and start doing the work only you can do. Whether you're 18 and getting started, or 48 and restless, What's the Point? is a roadmap for packing more life into your work, starting today.

You've Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation by Benoit Denizet-Lewis, published by William Morrow

From New York Times bestselling author Benoit Denizet-Lewis comes a timely, provocative, and deeply moving exploration of personal transformation in a period of roiling uncertainty. You’ve Changed investigates how we remake ourselves—and how identity, belief, and belonging shift in a world that won’t stop doing the same.

We live in an age obsessed with reinvention. On Instagram, in recovery meetings, through name-change petitions, lifestyle pivots, deconversion blogs, and political conversion manifestos, we’re surrounded by stories of radical personal change. But what does it really mean to shed an old skin—and why do some transformations inspire us while others raise our hackles?

Longtime New York Times Magazine writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis, known for his deeply reported and psychologically rich journalism, takes us on a freewheeling, wild-hearted journey into the mystery of human transformation. He introduces us to an unforgettable array of people in flux—including psychedelic reality benders, sexual and gender transitioners, ideological shapeshifters, seemingly reformed murderers, and an octogenarian grandmother trying to change her temperament (“Better late than never!” she says)—as well as those working to engineer change: psychologists, neuroscientists, name-change specialists, even his own father, a breath and meditation teacher who once wrote a newsletter about “the art and science of transformation.” Intertwined with those portraits of change is the author’s own reckoning—by turns painful, poignant, and hilarious—with his misfires and epiphanies.

You’ve Changed is a book for anyone who’s ever tried to become someone new, fix what felt broken, drag someone else into changing, or wondered whether real transformation is anything more than a myth we sell ourselves. Denizet-Lewis shows us that profound, positive change is possible—and offers an unexpected, sometimes counterintuitive set of approaches to help us get there. But this is no compass for the dogmatic or the quick-fix brigade. Change, he shows us, is slippery, scary, beautiful, often politically fraught—and best tackled with humility riding shotgun, holding the map upside down.