A Reading List for Retreat

The right book on retreat is not one you finish but one you keep returning to — a few pages at a time, slowly. This annotated list gathers durable companions from across the contemplative tradition, old and new. None is required; all reward unhurried reading.

The old sources

• The Psalms. The oldest retreat book of all. Read one or two slowly a day and they become a mirror for almost any inner weather. Freely available in many editions.
• The Confessions of Augustine. The original spiritual autobiography, and still one of the most searching. Its famous restlessness — "our heart is restless until it rests in you" — is the ancestor of every retreat since.
• The Cloud of Unknowing. An anonymous medieval English guide to contemplative prayer, plain-spoken and surprisingly modern in its counsel simply to let thoughts go.

The modern contemplatives

• Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation. The twentieth century's most widely read guide to the contemplative life, by a monk who wrestled openly with the tension between solitude and the world.
• Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart. A short, warm book on solitude, silence, and prayer drawn from the desert tradition — an ideal first retreat companion.
• Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk. A poet's account of time spent among Benedictines; especially good on how liturgy and routine shape attention.

On silence and attention

• Works on lectio divina. Any good short guide to slow, prayerful reading will repay the time; the practice itself is described on our page on the practice of silence.
• T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets. Not a religious manual but a great poem of stillness and time — the source of the phrase "the still point of the turning world" that gives this site its name.

How to read on retreat

Resist the urge to cover ground. Choose one book, read a few pages, and then set it down and sit with what struck you. If a single sentence stops you, stay there — that is the reading doing its work. A retreat is one of the few settings left in modern life where slowness is the whole point, and reading slowly is a skill worth recovering.

Where to find these books: most of the older titles are in the public domain and freely available; a good public library will have the rest. For how to structure the time around them, see planning a personal retreat.

Titles are listed for reference only; this site sells nothing and earns nothing from these mentions.