New Self-Help Books That Made The New York Times Best Seller List in February 2024

This book by Kate Bowler is packed with bite-size reflections and action-oriented steps to help you get through the day, be it good, bad, or totally mediocre. It invites readers to embrace the bad, not just the good. The book is a devotional for the rest of us—which is to say, the people who don’t have magical lives that always work out for the best.

In this memoir, Madeline Pendleton shares her journey from living paycheck to paycheck to creating a multi-million-dollar business that offers a compassionate alternative to capitalism. She studied the rules of capitalism and used what she learned to build a new kind of business, one rooted in an ethos of community care.

This book by Noah Kagan is a step-by-step guide to launching a business with 7-figure potential in just 48 hours. It shows you how to overcome your fears, pick, structure, and validate a great idea, and then scale it to your first million dollars and beyond.

This book by John Mark Comer is about rediscovering the path that leads to a deeper life with God. It emphasizes the importance of being with Jesus, becoming like him, and doing as he did. The book introduces spiritual formation and presents a set of practices and relational rhythms that slow us down and open up space in our daily lives for God to transform us.

Written by Cole Arthur Riley, this book offers prayers, poems, and meditations for staying human. It centers Black emotions, experiences, memories, and bodies in every prayer, mantra, and poem. The book was born out of a need for a more human, more liberating expression of faith, and it connects spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black memory, and the Black body.

This book by Dr. Aliza Pressman provides five practices for boosting children’s resilience. It stresses that parents should serve as a stable source of support, take time to reflect on how to best meet their children’s needs, regulate their own emotions, set limits on acceptable behavior, and go out of their way to remedy any rifts that arise between parent and child.

This book by Emily Nagoski dispels the myths we’ve been taught about sex, such as the belief that sexual satisfaction and desire are highest at the beginning of a relationship and inevitably decline the longer the relationship lasts. Nagoski assures us that this is not true.

This book by John and Julie Gottman is about how successful couples turn conflict into connection. It teaches us the five secrets that help us get back on track and harness conflict to build stronger, healthier relationships.

Cancel culture refers to the mass withdrawal of support from public figures or celebrities who have done things that aren’t socially accepted today. This practice of “canceling” or mass shaming often occurs on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.

This book by Tabitha Brown presents an inspirational guide for encouraging positive changes in your life—one day and one challenge at a time. The challenge was simple. Every day she would do something she’d never done before. The point was that she was going to take a leap of faith and watch God open up a new lane for her.

Dear Black Girls is a letter to all Black girls. Every single day, poet and educator Shanice Nicole is reminded of how special Black girls are and of how lucky she is to be one. The book’s illustrations by Kezna Dalz support the message that no two Black girls are the same but they are all special—that to be a Black girl is a true gift. This book serves as a celebration of the uniqueness and importance of Black girls.