As vacations beckon in the remaining weeks of summer, here are several books that explore ways in which to reconsider your leisure time, your working life and your financial future. In our latest roundup, SmartMoney's editors and writers recommend books ranging from an exploration about the satisfaction of craftsmanship, to one figuring out the fundamentals of investing, to a memoir examining a life filled with astronomical achievement and earthbound despair.

Here are six of our latest picks:

Author: Matthew B. Crawford
Reviewed by: Will Swarts, Reporter, SmartMoney.com

In his brief but densely referenced celebration of the manual arts, philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford takes on the nature of work and its inherent value to the individual who performs it. Less turgid than a treatise and smarter than a screed, this insistent essay, critique and exultation of the craftsmanship and virtue of careful, precise labors in Crawford's case, the proper and thorough repair of motorcycles champions the worth and meaning of practical experience, a quality he finds sorely lacking in today's "knowledge workers."

Crawford quit a prestigious think tank and abandoned academia to find greater satisfaction in motorcycle repair work, but Shop Class also reflects the breadth of his book-learned influences. Citing everyone from Aristotle to Heidegger, with plenty of sociology and historical critique mixed in, he explores the need for, and the paths to, meaningful work for which one can take full responsibility. This is a bracing retort to the alienation of an office job. With Wall Street's fortunes at an ebb, Crawford might convince at least a few drones to flee their cubicle walls and find deeper satisfaction toiling in lift bays, confident that the results of their labors are tangible and rooted in a personal sense of craft.

Author: Jonathan Clements
Reviewed by: Dyan Machan, Senior Writer, SmartMoney

"The Little Book of Main Street Money" is aptly named: At 5 by 7 inches and under 200 pages, it's unintimidating to all but the most hopeless finance-phobics. The book is also written in spare and concise language. Clements's style will be familiar to many from his years as a personal-finance columnist at The Wall Street Journal. Now Clements is director of financial guidance at Citigroup's personal-finance group.

In Little Book of Main Street Money, Clements's sure-footed advice on fundamentals is comforting after last year's meltdown. When he strays toward more opinionated views, he's even better: Investing in your house will historically offer you a lackluster 4.7% annual return. Or, to those buying insurance as an investment: "So sorry to hear it." Clements also reminds us, "The harder you try to beat the market, the more likely you are to fail, thanks to the investment costs involved." Best of all, Clements isn't only a sound financial planner, but something of an armchair shrink. Beating the market isn't what it's all about. It's more about meeting your personal goals and achieving peace of mind: "We should strive to ensure money is enhancing our lives, rather than getting in the way."

Author: Chris Anderson
Reviewed by: Miriam Gottfried

The business model of the future will be to give things away free, says Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson. Despite this claim, most of his examples YouTube, Facebook and online games, to name just a few are from the present. Anderson's book is more a snapshot of the current state of affairs than a prognostication. He charts how the abundance created by the transition from selling physical products to digital bits has brought the marginal cost of many items to near zero.

Anderson makes a convincing case that more companies are shifting to Free (Anderson capitalizes the F ), but he doesn't say how profitable these strategies are. So, struggling old-line media companies newspapers, broadcast television and Anderson's own magazine won't find any solutions here. But readers will find inadvertent examples of Anderson's argument: This already-provocative book stirred further controversy after claims that Anderson plagiarized certain passages in it from Wikipedia. (Critics suggested he took the "free" theory too literally; Anderson said it was a mistake.) Anderson's book is worth a read, if only to weigh in on the current debate.

Author: Joyce Maynard
Reviewed by: AnnaMaria Andriotis, Reporter, SmartMoney.com

For many of us, summer fuels a nostalgia for our carefree youth. In her new novel, Joyce Maynard brings that youth to life, through the voice of a 13-year-old boy over a long weekend in 1987. And it's anything but carefree. Like many coming-of-age novels, this one begins when a stranger enters the closed-off lives of a family, here young Henry and his mother Adele. Newcomer Frank becomes both a father figure to the boy and lover to his mother, and brings with him a shameful past and a capacity to change others.

Maynard, the author of five previous novels ("To Die For" and others) as well as nonfiction that includes a bestselling memoir of her youthful affair with reclusive author J.D. Salinger, has created in Henry a narrator with a long literary tradition: the observant, confused adolescent. Unlike Salinger's iconic Holden Caulfield, however, Henry is not ironically alienated. He will be recognizable, though, to a generation of readers familiar with single-parent homes and the children in them longing for connection. Maynard details Henry's roller-coaster emotions for Frank he is both jealous and grateful and his mother's emotional journeys with skill and tenderness for the uncertain willingness of broken hearts to mend. The poignant results are revealing of our ability to forgive and to grow.

Author: Buzz Aldrin with Ken Abraham
Reviewed by Thomas E. Weber, Editor, SmartMoney.com

For the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission comes this memoir from Buzz Aldrin, the second human being to set foot on the moon. There's plenty to keep space fans happy: Aldrin shares his key moon-landing memories and lays out his ideas for America's future space strategy. But there's another side to this book, and for many readers it will be at least as thought-provoking as all the rocket talk. Aldrin recounts his well-known struggles with depression and alcoholism after returning to Earth. It's the tale of a man who worked relentlessly to achieve a goal only to realize he didn't know how to move forward. For anyone who has wondered what to do with success, or who has grappled with adversity, it's a reminder that some human frailties are universal even for a moonwalker.

Read SmartMoney's recent interview with Aldrin here along with a look at the big companies

Author: Christopher Ransom
Reviewed by: Robert J. Hughes

Adjustable-rate mortgages are frightening indeed, but what about the underlying property? This debut novel by Christopher Ransom gives a new spin to the venerable haunted-house story. Here, sometime screenwriter Conrad Harrison makes a mistake common to many potential homeowners: not doing due diligence on a house with great curb appeal. His second mistake? Figuring a house will be just the thing to save his troubled marriage. After the couple move into that old Victorian in a pretty Wisconsin town, Conrad's wife flees it for a sales conference in another state, leaving Conrad unsupervised. He befriends the pregnant daughter of neighbors and looks after her when they go off on their own trip. The daughter also has a seriously unstable, jealous boyfriend.

Did we mention the house itself, with its sounds of crying newborns, its fleeting glimpses of a figure in the dark? The old photographs of a woman who looks like Conrad's wife? Or the garage, where Conrad keeps his rare pet snakes? Ransom has a distinctive narrative voice, and a Stephen King-like gift for the dreadful lurking behind the everyday. Throughout the novel, we're not sure whether something is very, very wrong with the house or with Conrad. The novel builds to a gripping climax that will make you think twice, maybe three times, about making an offer on that beautiful old fixer-upper.