Feel empowered!
Whether it's a fictional story, a nonfiction narrative or a self-help book we've curated the best books to empower you from 2023. Let these books carry you into 2024 with your head up and ready to face the world with whatever lays in front of you.
Check out the nominees of the 3rd Annual Bookfinity Moodie Awards. These are the best of the best books of the past 12 months. The books were selected based on how they made the reader feel once they read the book.
This Year’s Mood Categories:
Empowered – The book that cheered on your soul.
Scared – The book that you couldn’t stop reading...even when your hands were shaking.
Happy – The book that boosted your “Moodie” and brightened your spirits.
Inspired – The book that left you more motivated than before.
Informed – The book that gifted you with more perspective.
Amused – The book you couldn't put down and that left you delightfully entertained.
View the winners and other moods now!
books to Empower
Crook Manifesto
by Colson Whitehead
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, NPR, BookPage
It's 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It's strictly the straight-and-narrow for him -- until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up his old police contact Munson, fixer extraordinaire. But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated - and deadly.
Family Meal
by Bryan Washington
From the bestselling, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, an irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss.
Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ's family bakery. TJ's not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said - and left unsaid - to save each other? Could they find a way back to being okay again, or maybe for the first time?
Berry Pickers
by Amanda Peters
2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Winner
Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction Finalist
July 1962. A Mi'kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family's youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister's disappearance for years to come.
Change Your Brain Every Day: Simple Daily Practices to Strengthen Your Mind, Memory, Moods, Focus, Energy, Habits, and Relationships
by Amen MD Daniel G Amen MD Daniel G
Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly bestseller
366 Days to a Better Brain, Mind, and Life!
In Change Your Brain Every Day psychiatrist and clinical neuroscientist Daniel Amen, MD, draws on over 40 years' clinical practice with tens of thousands of patients to give you the most effective daily habits he has seen that can help you improve your brain, master your mind, boost your memory, and make you feel happier, healthier, and more connected to those you love.
Financial Feminist: Overcome the Patriarchy's Bullsh*t to Master Your Money and Build a Life You Love
by Tori Dunlap
An instant New York Times bestseller
Tori Dunlap was always good with money. As a kid, she watched her prudent parents balance their checkbook every month and learned to save for musical tickets by gathering pennies in an Altoids tin. But she quickly discovered that her experience with money was pretty unusual, especially among her female friends.
It wasn't our fault. Investigating this financial literacy and wealth gap, Tori found that girls are significantly less likely to receive a holistic financial education; we're taught to restrain our spending, while boys are taught about investing and rewarded for pursuing wealth. In adulthood, women are hounded by the unfounded stereotype of the frivolous spenders whose lattes are to blame for the wealth gap.
Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity
by Peter Attia - Bill Gifford
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Wouldn't you like to live longer? And better? In this operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia draws on the latest science to deliver innovative nutritional interventions, techniques for optimizing exercise and sleep, and tools for addressing emotional and mental health.
For all its successes, mainstream medicine has failed to make much progress against the diseases of aging that kill most people: heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and type 2 diabetes. Too often, it intervenes with treatments too late to help, prolonging lifespan at the expense of healthspan, or quality of life. Dr. Attia believes we must replace this outdated framework with a personalized, proactive strategy for longevity, one where we take action now, rather than waiting.
Warrior Girl Unearthed
by Angeline Boulley
An Instant New York Times bestseller!
A #1 Indies Bestseller!
An Amazon Best Book of the Year!
Winner of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award!
A BookPage Best Book of the Year!
Perry Firekeeper-Birch has always known who she is - the laidback twin, the troublemaker, the best fisher on Sugar Island. Her aspirations won't ever take her far from home, and she wouldn't have it any other way. But as the rising number of missing Indigenous women starts circling closer to home, as her family becomes embroiled in a high-profile murder investigation, and as greedy grave robbers seek to profit off of what belongs to her Anishinaabe tribe, Perry begins to question everything.
Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most
by Miroslav Volf - Matthew Croasmun - Ryan McAnnally-Linz
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Financial Times' “Best books of 2023 -- Health & Wellness”
What makes a good life? The question is inherent to the human condition, asked by people across generations, professions, and social classes, and addressed by all schools of philosophy and religions. This search for meaning, as Yale faculty Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz argue, is at the crux of a crisis that is facing Western culture, a crisis that, they propose, can be ameliorated by searching, in one's own life, for the underlying truth.
The Creative ACT: A Way of Being
by Rick Rubin
The #1 New York Times bestseller.
Many famed music producers are known for a particular sound that has its day. Rick Rubin is known for something else: creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable.
The Woman in Me
by Britney Spears
"In Britney Spears's memoir, she's stronger than ever." --The New York Times
The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.
In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice--her truth--was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey--and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.
Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears's groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love--and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.