BONUS | Books You Can Finish In One Sitting (And Actually Remember)

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1:00Ryan Holiday: W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Wayfair. Every style, every home. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

1:20Amazing books you can read in a single sitting.

1:25The War of Art. This is a book you can read in one sitting and then you should read it again and again and again. I try to read it before I start any creative project. Seneca's essay on the shortness of life, one of the greatest pieces of philosophy ever written. It's not that life is short, he says. It's that we waste a lot of it. Zen and the Art of Archery, another amazing philosophy book from the other side of the world. This is the new Walter Isaacson book, the greatest sentence ever written about the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence. Behold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

2:03On the 250th anniversary of our country, he does a nice, what is this, 70-page or so meditation on a wonderful sentence and what it means. 84, Charing Cross Road. Again, And this doesn't seem like an amazing book, but it is the series of letters between a screenwriter in the U.S. and an antique bookseller in the U.K. right after World War II. But you will fall in love with all the characters in this book and devour it in one setting. So this little book, I loved it so much I bought a thousand copies of it. I think we're one of the only bookstores in the country that has it. This is a little book by Stefan Zweig, who wrote The World of Yesterday.

2:40And it's just a short biography of Montaigne. He's writing as the world is falling apart, and he's writing about a guy, Montaigne, who is writing and thinking when his world is falling apart. It is a lovely book that you can read very quickly. This is Gip from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindberg. It's a lady walking along a beach riffing on modernity, quietness, stillness, writing on youth, age, love and marriage, peace, solitude and contentment. She writes this on a brief vacation, and it's kind of a vacation of a book to read. I actually read this flying to the beach on vacation on a two-hour flight or so.

3:18It's perfect. Oh, and then I have one other one. The Boy, the Fox, the Horse, and the Mole. This is one I read to my kids. It's just the right length. Sometimes we'll do it in two sittings, but it is a lovely, moving allegory that you will very much like. This one's almost too short to be a book, but it is, in fact, a book. This is Stockdale's Courage Under Fire. This is a man testing the doctrines of Epictetus in the Hanoi Hilton as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Okay, 21 pages. So you can do this in less than one sitting. I think you'll like this one now. Meditations is technically 170 pages.

3:59You can read it in one sitting. You're not supposed to. I prefer to flip through it. Actually, when you take out the intro and debts and lessons, you're talking 150 pages. So I think this is a one sitting book, but this is a book you should be sitting with over and over and over again Over the course of your life. This is Claire Keegan's small things like these. I'll get one novel in here. This book is 114 pages, but it is Incredible the ending it's gonna fuck you up, but it's very good Here's some more really amazing books that you can sit down and read in one sitting. This one is very relevant today This is written by General Smedley Butler.

4:35This is War is a Racket, the anti-war classic by one of the most decorated Marines in U.S. history. This is the best line. It says, a racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the very many. And out of war, a few people make huge fortunes. This is a guy who knows what he's talking about. not just some anti-war activist or whatever, but someone who served in a bunch of different American wars and knew what he was talking about.

5:08Okay, this book is only 79 pages, but boy, it'll hit you very hard. In this searing novel, Catherine Cressman Taylor brings vividly to life the insidious spread of Nazism through a series of letters between Max, a Jewish art dealer in San Francisco and Martin, his friend and former business partner who has returned to Germany in 1932, just as Hitler is coming to power. To me, it's a fascinating look at how people accommodate themselves to things, rationalize things, deny what's obviously happening and lose their humanity. Sojourner Truth, one of the pioneers of both the anti-slavery movement and the women's rights movement, she gives this famous speech called Ain't I a Woman?

5:49Although she actually didn't. And one of the interesting things about her is she was a formerly enslaved woman in New York. The only accent she would have had would have been a Dutch accent because she also spoke Dutch. But she gave this famous speech about how she says, I am a woman's rights. But it gets translated into slave dialect to have more resonance of the time. So she's actually a very articulate person. But this is a great tract on equality and feminism that everyone should read. Okay. This is the classic text on great samurai warrior Musashi. The Book of Five Rings is one of the most insightful texts on the subtle arts of confrontation and victory to emerge from Asian culture.

6:26It was composed in 1643 by the famed duelist and undefeated samurai Miyamoto Musashi. It's a great little translation. You can read this. If you haven't read The Art of War, you should also read that. But this is like sort of an equivalent text to The Art of War. Everyone should read that. All right. So this is a letter, 120 pages. This is a letter that Kafka wrote to his father. He had this overbearing, imperious, judgmental father. They never got along. He never understood his son. And so one day Kafka sits down and he says, I'm gonna write him a letter, just pouring out all my thoughts and emotions.

6:58And that's what this book is. He sends it to his mother, who of course never gives it to his father. But this to me is a great parenting book. It's also a great book if you had difficult parents yourself. I like Austin Kleon's books. Steal Like an Artist is great. You could probably do all three of these books on a plane. Steal Like an Artist is great. Show Your Work is great. keep going is great. If you want to be more creative, you want to be more inspired, you want to do better work, you want to build an audience for your work, I think these three books are great. And they've got, you know, lovely little drawings and doodles in them too.

7:27You can definitely read these in one sitting. This is a book my editor gave me once. This is The Journalist and the Murderer. So Joe McGinnis was a famous best-selling author. He's writing a book about a man who's on trial for murder. And then that man sues him for libel. It's this fascinating, crazy book. It has the most famous line in probably all of journalism here at the beginning.

8:03Everyone should read this book. Timothy Snyder's short book on tyranny, very apropos of this moment, clocks in at 126 pages. If people could just read these pages, we would be in better faith. This is one of the greatest sports books ever written. I would not have guessed that it was so short. It is exactly 150 pages about the famous match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graibner. Just an incredible, exquisite piece of sports writing and character study and psychology. It's so stuck in my mind and so riveting. I would have guessed it's 250 or 300 pages. but it obviously reads much faster than that.

8:48This is The Way of Love by Anthony DeMeo. Not only is it only, it's 190 pages or so, but these are very little pages. If you wanted to put this on a normal size, it's gonna get way smaller. Basketball coach gave me this book one time and it changed my life. Just absolutely beautiful writing in here. If you want more book recommendations, I send these out in my reading list newsletter, which I've sent out every month for 15 years. and you can sign up at ryanholiday.net reading list.