On the note of the Desert Fathers, the "Life of St. Anthony" written by St. Athanasius is one of my favorite books, and is a relatively short and accessible read: http://newadvent.org/fathers/2811.htm or for a facsimile of a print from 1697: https://archive.org/details/TheLifeOfStAntony/page/n5/mode/2...
“these were men who believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster.“