Our editor, Sara, wrote a beautiful article in this issue about becoming a reader. You’ll also find Book Bingo and a planning sheet to help you create your own summer reading rhythm. Below are some of the books featured throughout this issue, along with a few ideas to help you make reading part of your season.
Pass It On
When you finish a book you love, consider passing it along to a friend with a note about why it made you think of them.
It’s a simple way to share a story, deepen a connection, and bring a little joy to someone’s mailbox.
Reading Afternoons
What if reading became part of your summer rhythm?
Choose one afternoon each week to end work a little early and dedicate time to reading. Create a space that feels inviting—a hammock, lounge chair, beach towel, poolside seat, kayak, café, bookstore, or library.
Gather books you’re genuinely excited to read. You might choose a theme, explore one author’s work, or create a stack with a little variety.
A few simple steps:
Block reading afternoons on your calendar now.
Gather a stack of books you’re excited to read.
Decide where you’ll spend your reading time.
On Mia’s Nightstand
Every summer, I make room for a few novels to get lost in. But if I’m honest, I’m mostly a nonfiction reader. The books on my nightstand are usually split between life and business because both fascinate me, and both help me grow.
Summer gives me a little more space to read. I love spending an hour in the hammock with a good book, and I never head to the beach without one.
These four books are part of my summer reading stack—not just to enjoy, but to underline, study, and integrate. (I tell you why I’m excited about them in the magazine.)
The Company We Keep: Friendship, Connection, and Redefining What It Means to Grow Together by Alex Elle
The Company We Keep is a vulnerable exploration of the friendships that shape us, stretch us, and sometimes wound us. The book offers readers permission to evolve in their friendships and reminds us that the people we surround ourselves with are not only mirrors, but key companions on the lifelong journey of healing, self-trust, and belonging.
Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors by Perdita Finn
Mothers of Magic braids memoir with cultural history. Perdita Finn introduces us to a pantheon of maternal figures, and through these stories and her own journey of transformation, reveals what becomes possible when we recover an ecological feminism that restores our relationship with our bodies, our mothers, and the body of our world.
The Miracle Hour: Predictable Sales in an Hour a Day by Kelly Roach
The Miracle Hour challenges the idea that building a successful business requires endless hours and constant hustle. Drawing from her own journey from corporate executive to entrepreneur, Kelly Roach shares a simple but powerful framework for creating predictable growth through one focused hour of intentional, revenue-generating activity each day.
Be The Queen of Your Money: How to Create Financial Freedom with Ease and Grace by Christine Walsh
Be the Queen of Your Money is an empowering guide to creating a healthier, more trusting relationship with money. Christine Walsh invites readers to let go of fear, redefine what wealth means to them, and build financial freedom from a place of self-worth, confidence, and alignment with their deepest values.
From Our Interviews
The conversations in this issue inspired plenty of additions to our reading lists. Here are a few books written by contributors.
Sketch by Sketch by Sheila Darcey
Nadja EAT MOVE GLOW: The Cookbook
Dive Deeper
Want to explore some of the topics featured throughout this issue? These books offer a deeper look at ideas we’ve been discussing.
How Do You Choose?: A Human Design Guide to What’s Best for You at Work, in Love, and in Life – Unlock Your Potential Through Type, Strategy, and Authority by Erin Claire Jones
A Modern Guide to Human Design: How to Read Your Chart and Align With Your Life’s True Purpose by Rachel Lieberman
The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson
The Romance Collection
Romance may be the classic beach read, but this collection offers more than a summer escape.
Each of these authors is a friend or client who built a writing practice alongside full lives, businesses, careers, and family responsibilities. Their books are a reminder that creativity doesn’t arrive when life gets quieter—it happens when we make space for it.
I hope these stories bring a little sweetness to your summer reading and inspire you to consider the creative project waiting inside you.
The Across the Hall series are spicy, bingeable novellas set in a San Francisco apartment building — a fake fiancé who falls way too hard, a brother’s best friend who wakes up in the wrong bed, and an enemies-to-lovers slow burn between a workaholic and the assistant she didn’t ask for. Every book is a standalone, every couple is different, and every one can be finished in a single night.
The Across the Hall series is available on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited.
All Twerk, No Play is a spicy neighbors-to-lovers romance about Victoria, a sharp-tongued attorney who fake-dates her building’s too-charming personal trainer to escape her disastrous ex — only to discover the man she least expected might be exactly what she needs. Set in Saratoga Springs, New York, it’s a black-cat/golden-retriever love story full of banter, bad decisions, and a playlist that will get stuck in your head.
All Twerk, No Play is the second book in the All or Nothing series, available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.
The Medicine Game series brings Indigenous culture and professional lacrosse to the heart of love stories, centering a sport the Haudenosaunee people have always known for its healing properties. Each book follows a badass Indigenous woman: a teacher woven into the fabric of her reservation, a cultural educator preserving what can’t afford to be lost, and a tech entrepreneur who opened a repair shop to protect her elders from scammers. The romances are warm, slow-burning, and full of found family who take care of each other like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
The Medicine Game series is available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.