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

Most people don’t finish what they start, especially when it comes to books. In this episode, Ryan shares a curated list of books you can read in a single sitting.👉 Sign up for Ryan’s free monthly reading list newsletter: https://ryanholiday.net/reading-list/ 📚 You can grab all the books mentioned in this episode at Ryan's bookstore, The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/🎥 VIDEO EPISODE | Watch this episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_IeE3cGV8w 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  Amazing books you can read in a single sitting.

• 0:20Ryan Holiday?

  The 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. "We hold 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." On the 250th anniversary of our country, he does a nice, what is this, 70-page or so meditation

• 1:04Ryan Holiday?

  on a wonderful sentence and what it means. 84 Charing Cross Road. Again, this doesn't seem like an amazing book, but it is the series of letters between a screenwriter in the US and an antique bookseller in the UK, right after World War II. But you will fall in love with all of the characters in this book and devour it in one sitting. So this little book, I loved it so much, I bought 1,000 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. And 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.

• 1:48Ryan Holiday?

  This is Gip from the Sea by Anne-Marie 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 through the beach on vacation on a two-hour flight or so. It'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. It's a product you will very much like. This one's almost too short to be a book, but it is, in fact, a book.

• 2:33Ryan Holiday?

  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, though. Meditations is technically 170 pages. You 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,

• 3:17Ryan Holiday?

  but it is incredible. The ending, it's gonna fuck you up, but it's very good. Here are some more really amazing books that you can sit down and read in one sitting. All right, this one is very relevant today. It's written by General Smedley Butler. This is War is a Racket, the anti-war classic by one of the most decorated Marines in US 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

• 4:01Ryan Holiday?

  American wars and knew what he's talking about. Okay, this book is only...

• 4:07Ryan Holiday?

  Seventy-nine 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 antislavery movement and the women's rights movement, she gives this famous speech called "Anti a Woman," although she actually didn't. One of the interesting things about her is she was a formerly enslaved woman in New York.

• 4:51Ryan Holiday?

  The only accent she would have had was 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. It 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.

• 5:36Ryan Holiday?

  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 going to write him a letter," just pouring out all my thoughts and emotions. And 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, if you want to be more inspired, if you want to do better work, if you want to build an audience for your work. These three books are great and they've got lovely little drawings and doodles in them

• 6:21Ryan Holiday?

  too. You 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 bestselling 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. "Every journalist who is too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust, and betraying them without remorse." Everyone should read this book.

• 7:01Ryan Holiday?

  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 shape. 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 Grabner. 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. This is The Way of Love

• 7:44Ryan Holiday?

  by Anthony DeMayo. 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 going to 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. You can sign up at ryanholiday.net/readinglist.