🎧 Available on Audible.
A book by Sam Harris.
<aside> ☝ Note there is an app of the same name: Waking Up. What's the difference between the "Waking Up" book and app?
</aside>
This is probably one of the very first books and resources I would recommend to anyone.
Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others. ... Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved. If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life — you won’t enjoy any of it.
There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that it expresses a specific kind of passion — a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or body—thoughts, sensations, moods — without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant.
(Quotes sources from the above GoodReads link).
This is grouped in [WIP] Stage 1 Resources (What's with the '3 Stages'?), right near the top, and it's typically the first book I'd recommend to people.
In it, Sam takes a rational and logical approach to explain how meditation is a worthwhile and significant endeavour, and what exactly that means.
This is a very approachable and to-the-point book, especially suitable for skeptical Westerners, or those who either have no experience or even negative connotations with something one might term "spirituality".
I seriously could not recommend this book more highly, and the audiobook version (narrated by the author) available on Audible is excellent.