Our Summer Reading List: Fiction & Nonfiction Highlights
There’s a special connection between summer and reading. The days are longer, the pace is a little slower, and somehow that creates the perfect setting to open a book and wander through its pages.
As you can imagine, reading never really slows down for us. Still, Allison and Monica are preparing for an extra season of discovery and have selected their summer reads: a carefully curated mix of fiction and nonfiction titles that have captured their attention and that we hope will inspire yours as well.
As always, we hope you enjoy this selection.
Fiction
Sorrow & Strangers
By Alexis Rune, Jeanette Rose
Book #2 of Avalon University Series
Fear. Fury. And Fire. To Know is Never Enough.
Summer Tuatha De Daanan reluctantly returns to Avalon University for her second year after spending the summer with her vampire best friend in Draculea. She’s a shell of her former self, and the peace promised to her has never felt further from her reach. All Summer wants is to keep her head down and get through the year cloaked in her depression, but looming threats linger, and she quickly finds herself thrust into a dangerous position once again; entangled with a friend turned enemy, the protector of her beloved family, and the target of two very powerful kings.
Three Days Grace
By Jeremy Bradley-Silverio Donato
Explore the complexities of love and loss through an LGBTQ+ lens in this emotionally layered novel about family, identity, and long-suppressed truths.
On the eve of their trip to South Africa, Lynne and her wife, Susan, await three guests in a Paris hotel: Nick, Lynne's distant son; Laslo, Susan's effusive friend; and Marc, a former professor living on borrowed glamour.
What begins as a bon voyage soon becomes a clash of old wounds and fresh resentments. As night falls, long-buried secrets surface, threatening to dismantle the facades each has built.
The Tragedy of King Leere, Goatherd of the la Sals
By Steven L. Peck
Like those three dimensional objects that look entirely different depending on the angle from which you view them, this novel presents a number of faces. From one direction you will see a conventional adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear set in the American West. However, if you view the book a few steps to the north, you will see a novel that is more Margaret Atwood than Shakespeare: a post-climate-change-catastrophe tale about a transgenic-goat rancher named Leere, the self-styled King of the La Sals Mountain Range in Utah. And from another angle still, the novel becomes a meditation on ecology, land, place, and consciousness!
Rose Dhu
By Mark Murphy
Dr. Janie O'Connor's disappearance from her Savannah estate, Rose Dhu, has shocked the town to its core. Her former fiancé, Phillip Carruthers—once the most eligible bachelor in coastal Georgia and the playboy son of Savannah's most powerful billionaire family—is the prime suspect.
Phillip maintains his innocence and seems to have an airtight alibi, and the case has local police stumped. But Detective Frank Winger, who has his own personal connection to Janie's family, is determined to discover what happened . . . as long as false witnesses, evidence tampering, and ghosts from his past don't get in the way.
Lessons in Trickery
By Ever King
Book #2 of the Eight-Book Contemporary Fantasy Series Academy of Villains
The story continues in Book 3 of the Academy of Villains series—a dark academia romantasy inspired by Hekate and Hermes, perfect for fans of Zodiac Academy and Shadow and Bone, featuring a secret relationship, divided loyalties, demons, titans, and a deadly quest.
In a kingdom where magic is slowly disappearing, an evil king hunts witches, brands their kind as traitors, and forces mages to serve under his endless rule. But the king hides many secrets, and one of them, when unearthed, will shatter the balance of power and unmask the mythic monster the world once mistook for a god.
Nonfiction
The Thought Leadership Handbook
By Bill Sherman, Peter Winick, and Naren Aryal
Discover the tools and traits of the leaders who shape the world’s big ideas.
Thought leadership can feel lonely because most practitioners only see their own struggles—late-night doubts, exhilarating breakthroughs, and the messy middle no one talks about. The Thought Leadership Handbook pulls back the curtain on a discipline that often feels like improvisation to bring clarity and a common vernacular that will help define the industry going forward. It’s a groundbreaking work for the executives, speakers, visionaries, and above all, thinkers across industries who dedicate their lives to making a lasting difference.
Scratching the Surface
By Danielle Mills Walden
Danielle Mills Walden’s journey to becoming a professional tennis player started when she was three years old.
By the age of ten, she was the #1-ranked player in her age group in the Western New York Region. At age eleven, she was admitted to IMG Academy, the prestigious sports boarding school known for turning out champions. The next twelve years took Danielle through a world of intense sports training and competition, reveling in glorious wins and suffering demoralizing defeats, while striving to live up to her parents’ high expectations. Plagued by criticism and injuries, Danielle refused to abandon her dream of becoming an elite player.
The Wisdom and Wealth Solution
By Feroz Ansari
Your Life Unboxed.
Money alone won’t make you truly rich, and wisdom without wealth won’t pay the bills. What if you could have both? The Wisdom and Wealth Solution shatters the myth that you must choose between a life of meaning and a life of money. Through his LIVING360 method, UC Irvine adjunct professor and seasoned wealth advisor Feroz Ansari unites both sides of the total wealth equation: wisdom wealth and financial wealth.
Mind Odyssey
By Spyros Papapetropoulos
Find Your Purpose. Master Emotional Balance. Create a Career That Fulfills You.
What if the key to navigating every career challenge—burnout, indecision, setbacks—was already inside your brain? In Mind Odyssey , neurologist and biotech executive Dr. Spyros Papapetropoulos blends neuroscience and storytelling to help you train your mind for clarity, confidence, and lasting fulfillment. Whether you’re at a crossroads or simply craving more meaning in your work, this book equips you to take control of your professional path.
The Doubt Loop
By Adam Crawshaw
Turn your inner critic into your startup’s unfair advantage.
Every founder wrestles with the same hidden battle: comparison, contradiction, and the fear that this might be the time they blow it. Adam Crawshaw has lived that loop—the anxiety, the constant recalibration, the quiet dread between milestones. The Doubt Loop is the manual he wishes he had then: a brutally clear field guide for founders who can’t afford to self-destruct.
Equal parts memoir and operator playbook, The Doubt Loop reframes hesitation as data—something to decode, not drown in. With raw stories, sharp frameworks, and zero fluff, Crawshaw breaks down how to spot when doubt is warning versus when it’s waste.
