365 days of reading: An e-book list for us New Year’s resolution types. Your own recs?

Nowadays I love books with daily readings.

My first was Simple Abundance, structured as a year of inspiration, essay-a-day style. The author, Sarah Ban Breathnach, writes of the need to make one’s own spirituality a part of life. She ties the theme for the day’s reading into the month, the season and so forth. Simple Abundance was meant to distill a huge mass of content into manageable chunks. I liked this format a lot, and have found tons of similar books at the Kindle store. Here are some I am pondering for my 2016 picks:

• The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days: A behemoth literary project of its time, The Harvard Classics aimed to compile the essentials of liberal arts education, as it existed in the late 19th century, into a collection that could fit on one five-foot shelf. All of the books are freely available in e-editions now. The Harvard Classics in a Year is based on a leaflet which came with the collection and offered a year’s worth of suggested readings. These have been helpfully compiled into this one Kindle volume for less than two bucks. Some of it is rather dry, and I have spotted a handful of typos. But The Harvard Classics in a Year could be a good entry point for someone who wants to read more classics and isn’t sure where to begin. While the title is masterful hyperbole, we can all at least aspire.

• The Daily Book of Art: 365 Readings that Teach, Inspire & Entertain: I checked out the paper copy first and found it less lavishly illustrated than I imagined, so I went with the Kindle version. This intriguing title covers about a dozen broad categories in the expansive discipline of ‘art’ and profiles key artists, famous works, famous museums, movements and schools of art and more. The book seems somewhat scattershot in its organization—it rotates amongst the different themes, and I might have preferred a more chronological format to truly learn the history of art as a whole. But there are lots of interesting tidbits here, so I might enjoy this one.

• The Daily Reader and The Daily Writer: These two titles, both of which I borrowed from Kindle Unlimited, have similar formats and approach the themes of reading and writing respectively via excerpts from great works of literature. I have not explored them much beyond just borrowing them and skimming, but they look good. One reviewer pointed out the folly of expecting someone to tackle a great work of literature with just one short excerpt to go on, but that is the nature of this sort of book. Better to read a short excerpt than none of it, ever, right?
• The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have: This is a ‘daily wisdom’ sort of thing in line with the Simple Abundance book. It came highly recommended to me. I am not sure I am up for another year of ‘wisdom’ just yet, but I have definitely bookmarked this one for later!

So those are my picks for next year. I suspect that The Daily Book of Art and The Daily Reader will come out on top. Does anyone else love these sorts of books? Any titles to recommend within this genre? Don’t just name a or titles. Tell why you like them.