A very balanced folk trilogy

If you get interest in Puritan style meditation then you will find endless pithy subject matter in Thomas Watson's Body of Practical Divinity. It is a golden book. It is one of a trilogy of Christian folk classics. The other two being John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; and Thomas Boston's Human Nature in its Fourfold State.

A very balanced trilogy.

Of course Watson's book is usually published in three volumes: A Body of Divinity, The Ten Commandments, and The Lord's Prayer.

All three (or five) books are available in excellent eBook editions at Monergism Books for free.

My advice is to just read straight through them (unless you're using them for subject matter to meditate upon), and trust that God enables such works to lodge in our memory. The Watson book in particular can seem like such an endless stream of myriad golden sayings that we wonder if any of it can catch in our memory, but I think, and I've experienced, that what we read stays with us more than we suspect at the time of reading.

Again, these are folk type classics. They are simple 'golden books.' Books you have on a plain, short bookshelf next to your Bible. Matthew Henry's Commentary - despite its length - would be another one.

I would add Homer and Plutarch to provide bracing contrast...or, if not so much contrast a sort of worldly yet appropriate seasoning to bring the collection to a biblically perfect 7.