Life changing one-day reads for the self-isolated

With many of us spending more time working from home and less time on projects, I thought I would list off some of my very favourite one-day-reads. These are books that can easily be read in one day, with a few brew breaks, and should – every one of them – change how we think.

Please note that I’m not advocating for everything in them, but I am advocating for the effect they have on how we think.

Some are <2hrs, others will take up to 8 (average reading speed). So, in no particular order:

Theology

Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, Søren Kierkegaard

On The Incarnation, St. Athanaisius

The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Director, Eugene H. Peterson

The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a Kempis

The Reformed Pastor, Richard Baxter

Knowing God, Jim Packer

The Difficult Doctrine Of The Love Of God, Don Carson

God’s Empowering Presence, Gordon Fee

Gospel & Kingdom, Graham Goldsworthy

The Cost Of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoffer

Holiness, J.C. Ryle

The Wounded Healer, Henri Nouman

The Passion of Jesus Christ, John Piper.

Holiness & Sexuality, David Peterson (ed.)

Politics, Philosophy and Society

The Republic, Plato

Apology of Socrates, Plato

The Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx

On Liberty, John Stewart Mill

Common Sense, Thomas Paine

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

In the Shadow of Man, Jane Goodall

Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes

Candide or Optimism, Voltaire

Existentialism and Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre

The Noonday Demon, Kathleen Norris

Psychology & Thinking

Syntactic Structures, Noam Chomsky

The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks

The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science, Jonathan Haidt

Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, Daniel Goleman

Against Empathy, Paul Bloom

Fiction

1984, George Orwell

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Robert Lewis Stevenson

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