What if three books could make you laugh until you cry, reach into your past and stir it up, and hand you the blueprint for the life you actually want, all before the summer ends?
Here is a confession to kick us off.
I am not finished with my current book yet.
Ninety-three straight weeks of showing up in this column, and this is the week Gabe breaks the rhythm. But hear me out, because I think you are going to like where this goes. Instead of forcing a half-baked review on a book I am only partway through, I decided to do something I have never done in ninety-three entries. I am pulling back the camera. Wide angle. Whole summer in the frame.
So welcome to the first ever Summer Edition of Book of the Week. My top three reads of 2026 so far, counted down like the main card at a title fight. Three books that put a smile on my face, made me laugh out loud, opened my eyes wider than teacups, and taught me something real about myself and the people I choose to surround myself with.
Now let me tell you why you should care, because your time is the most expensive thing you own and I am not going to waste it.
I read a ton of books. You know this about me by now. I read on my morning walks, I read on planes, I read in the quiet hours when the rest of the world is still asleep. And out of everything I have put in front of my eyes this year, these three did something the others did not. They made me reflect deeper, think harder, and challenge myself more than any other stretch of my entire life. Not one of them. All three. Back to back to back.
That is the whole promise of this article. If you pick up these three books, you are not getting entertainment and nothing else. You are getting a mirror, a gym for your mind, and a map. One book to feel, one book to laugh and toughen up, and one book to build. By the time you close the third one, you will not be the same person who opened the first. I can promise you that, because it happened to me.
Let’s get into it. Three, two, one.
Number 3: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
I found this one by pure happenchance.
No friend swore I had to read it. No algorithm shoved it at me. No podcast host talked it up for twenty minutes. It just landed in my hands at exactly the right moment, right as I was traveling to see my kid in college. And sometimes that is how the best ones find you. Not when you go hunting for them, but when life quietly sets them down in front of you and says, here, you need this right now.
And then I could not put it down. I mean that literally. The pages kept turning and the hours kept disappearing and I kept telling myself one more chapter until one more chapter turned into the whole thing.
Here is what made it hit me the way it did, and this is the part I want you to understand. The story had so many similarities to my own growing up that reading it stopped feeling like reading. It felt like living inside the book. I was not following a character. I was reminiscing on my own life while a stranger’s story played out on the page, and the two kept overlapping in ways that gave me chills. Most books talk at you from a safe distance. This one reached in and pulled something out of me that I did not even know I still carried.
That is a rare and powerful thing. And it is exactly why I am recommending it to you even if you have never picked up a literary novel in your life.
Yes, it is a heavy story on paper. Addiction. Foster kids. Hard lives in hard places in Appalachia. If you read that description cold, you might think it is not for you. But Kingsolver is a master, and she tells it in a way that grabs you by the collar and refuses to let go. It is entertaining. It is informative. And it carries an emotional pull that sneaks up quiet and then floors you when you least expect it.
So what do you actually get out of it? You get empathy for people whose lives look nothing like yours. You get a deeper appreciation for wherever you came from, no matter how hard it was. And if you grew up with any struggle at all, you get the strange comfort of seeing your own story reflected back at you with more grace than you ever gave it yourself. That is a gift. I did not expect a novel to hand it to me on a road trip to a college campus, but it did.
I can see any person picking this up and absolutely falling in love with it. And that is why a business guy who usually reads about leverage and systems put a novel at the very top of his summer list. Sometimes the most important thing a book can do is remind you exactly where you came from, so you never lose sight of how far you have walked.
Golden Squeegee Rating: 5.0 out of 5
Number 2: Living With a SEAL by Jesse Itzler
Oh my God. Where do I even start with this one.
If you want to laugh for days, this is the book. And I need you to take this next part as a genuine public safety warning. Make sure you are close to a bathroom, because you are going to laugh all the pee right out of yourself. I am not exaggerating for dramatic effect. This book is that funny. I had to put it down more than once just to catch my breath.
Here is the premise, and it is simple and completely insane. Jesse Itzler, a soft and wildly successful entrepreneur, invites a Navy SEAL to move into his home and run his life for a full month. No rules except one. Itzler has to do everything the SEAL says. What follows is a month of a comfortable man getting absolutely dismantled by someone who believes a normal Tuesday should include a thousand pushups, a run in a blizzard, and a cold that would make most people call in sick for a week.
I absolutely love this book. And it is the perfect summer read for one reason above all others. The humor. You are laughing on nearly every page.
Do not let the laughs fool you. This is a discipline book wearing a chicken suit, and that is exactly why it earned the number two spot instead of being a beach chair throwaway. Underneath every laugh there is a lesson quietly doing pushups of its own. Comfort is the enemy. Your body can do far more than your mind lets it. The ceiling you think you have is nowhere near your actual ceiling. And most of us live our whole lives inside a tiny fraction of what we are truly capable of.
Now think about that as a business owner, or as anyone building anything worth building. How much of your potential are you leaving on the table because the comfortable path feels good enough? How many times this year did you stop at good enough when great was sitting right there, one hard rep away? That is the question this book plants in your head while you are busy wiping tears of laughter off your face. That is a hard trick to pull off. Make a grown man laugh until he cries and quietly shift how he sees his own limits at the same time. Itzler nails it.
So here is what you get. You get the best belly laughs of your summer, and you get a real shot in the arm about pushing past your own comfort. Read it on a beach chair. Just apologize to the people around you in advance, because they are going to wonder what is wrong with you.
Golden Squeegee Rating: 4.8 out of 5
Number 1: The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
And here it is. The heavyweight champion of my summer. Number one.
This book teaches you how to really live your life. Not how to grind harder. Not how to squeeze one more hour out of an already crowded day. How to build genuine work life balance, the real kind, the kind most people only put on a motivational poster and never actually chase. It is the book that reorganized how I think about my hours, my business, and what all of this effort is even for in the first place.
And I will be honest with you, because honest is the only way I know how to write this column. Maybe I am currently living the life this book talks about. I roll into the office around ten in the morning and I am usually gone by four. I spent ten days in Spain and the business did not miss a single beat while I was walking foreign streets. Melisa and I just got back from a full week in Mexico, sipping margaritas, swimming in the pool, meeting new friends, and soaking up every minute while we celebrated our anniversary. Twenty six years together. And we are not slowing down, because we are already planning the next one, a trip to Spain and France. I built Window Ninjas over eight years to run on systems instead of running on me, and this book put words to a lot of what I had been feeling in my gut the whole way.
And you know what it did to me even after all that? It made me want more of it. Not more days off for the sake of laziness. More life for the sake of actually living it. More mountains. More trips with the people I love. More hours that belong to me instead of belonging to the machine I built.
That is the benefit waiting for you inside these pages. Ferriss forces you to do math that almost nobody wants to do. Would you rather make a huge number working yourself into the ground, or a smaller number while owning your calendar, your freedom, and your one and only life? Most people answer that fast and answer it wrong, because we have been trained since childhood to chase the bigger number without ever asking what it costs to get there.
I already wrote the full breakdown on this one earlier this year, and I went deep. The boat, the captain, and the owner. The line I still come back to almost every week, it is a me problem, not a Ninjas problem. If you want the whole deep dive, it is waiting for you over on gabesalinas.com. Read this roundup, then go read that one, and then go do the math on your own life.
Golden Squeegee Rating: 5.0 out of 5
Why These Three, And Why Now
Step back and look at the shape of this list, because the shape is the whole point.
A novel that grabbed my soul and dragged my own history up to the surface. A comedy that beat the comfort right out of me while I laughed until it hurt. And a manual for building the exact life I want to keep living. Heart. Grit. Leverage. That is not a random stack of books I happened to finish between May and August. That is a summer that quietly changed me, one page at a time.
And here is why I am handing all three to you in one article instead of stretching them across three weeks. Because together they do something none of them can do alone. One teaches you to feel. One teaches you to push. One teaches you to build. Feel, push, build. That is a full human being. That is a full life. Miss any one of the three and you are walking on a stool with a leg missing.
These three will make you smile. They will make you laugh out loud in public places. They will open your eyes bigger than teacups. And they will teach you something real about yourself and about the people you have chosen to keep around you. The storytelling in every single one is remarkable. Three completely different worlds, three completely different voices, and every one of them left me more awake than it found me.
So here is my ask, and I mean it as a challenge, not a suggestion. If you truly want to be entertained, learn something honest about life, and figure out how to build yours into the one you dream about when nobody is watching, pick up these three and ingest them like a big fat turkey on Thanksgiving. Do not nibble. Go all the way in. Fill your plate twice. I promise you will relate to them, enjoy every minute, and walk away astonished at what a few hundred pages can do to a person who reads with their guard down.
Now I am curious about you. Which one are you going to start with? The one that will make you feel, the one that will make you laugh, or the one that will make you build? Tell me, because I genuinely want to know which of these three grabs you the way they grabbed me.
Follow my journey at gabesalinas.com, subscribe on Substack, and connect with me on social media. I read these on my morning walks so you do not have to gamble your precious hours on whether they are worth it. These three are worth every second.
Keep Shining.
